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Each story in this jubilantly acclaimed collection pays testament to the wisdom and resilience of children, even in the face of the most agonizing circumstances.
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Destined to be the definitive story for the general public as well as policymakers, The Great Lakes Water Wars is a balanced, comprehensive look behind the scenes at the conflicts and compromises that are the past — and future — of this globally significant resource.
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Retired life insurance salesman Nathan Glass moves to Brooklyn to find anonymity and solitude through his declining years, but a chance meeting with Tom Wood, his long-lost nephew, forces him to come to terms with his past.
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Fresh from cooking school, Tom Feather and Cathy Scarlet are hot additions to the Dublin scene with their new catering company, but some people in the city, including their families, are not so keen on the idea of their success.
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Withdrawing into her photography and a job at a homeless shelter after being attacked while riding her bike, student Laurel Estabrook encounters Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of secret photos, but when Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel is certain that the photos hide a dark family secret and embarks on an obsessive, potentially dangerous search for the truth.
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Offered a coveted job to analyze and conserve a priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, Australian rare-book expert Hanna Heath discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the volume’s ancient binding that reveal its historically significant origins. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March.
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A wry account tracing an adventurous and arduous trek past the Appalachian Trail’s natural pleasures, human eccentrics, and offbeat comforts.
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During World War II, Louis Belk, a young American bomb disposal sergeant, is sent on a mission to Anchorage, Alaska, to find and disarm the balloon bombs launched by the Japanese against North America, a search that leads him to encounters with a variety of haunting individuals and sends him on a lifelong quest to understand the meaning of faith, friendship, trust, and love.
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The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Ántonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation immigrants.
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Describes the author’s encounter with a baby gray whale that had become separated from its mother off the southern California coast, and relates her efforts to reunite it with its mother.
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Her life turned upside-down when a Japanese internment camp is opened in their small Colorado town, Rennie witnesses the way her community places suspicion on the newcomers when a young girl is murdered, an event that prompts Rennie’s own perspective change and the discovery of dangerous secrets.
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In a novel that moves back and forth between the Soviet Union during World War II and modern-day America, Marina, an elderly Russian woman, recalls vivid images of her youth during the height of the siege of Leningrad when, as a tour guide at the Hermitage, she and other staff members removed the museum’s priceless artworks for safekeeping.
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A history of the Great Lakes as told by the biologists, fishermen, sailors, and others who have experienced them firsthand traces the author’s experiences as a local resident and schooner crewperson.
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In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter’s affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.
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A true story of love stronger than Nazi persecution. Things We Couldn’t Say is the true story of Diet Eman, a young Dutch woman, who, with her fiancé, Hein Sietsma, risked everything to rescue imperiled Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II.
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Eleven-year-old asthmatic Reuben Land chronicles the Land family’s odyssey in search of Reuben’s older brother, Davy, who has escaped from jail before he can stand trial for the killing of two marauders who came to their Minnesota farm to harm the family.
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In 1915 Minnesota, Monte Becket, a novelist, joins Glendon Hale, an outlaw intent on reconciling with his family, whom he had abandoned more than two decades earlier, but on their journey Becket leaves his own family behind and Glendon Hale is pursued by Charles Siringo, a relentless former Pinkerton agent.
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Based on actual historical events, this novel follows the indomitable May Dodd as she travels to the Cheyenne, becomes the bride of Little Wolf, chief of that tribe, and struggles with living in and being loyal to two different worlds.
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Set in twelfth-century England, this epic of kings and peasants juxtaposes the building of a magnificent church with the violence and treachery that often characterized the Middle Ages.
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As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love.
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An intimate memoir of growing up in Africa during the Rhodesian civil war of 1971 to 1979 describes the author’s life on farms in southern Rhodesia, Milawi, and Zambia, detailing her hardscrabble existence with an alcoholic mother, frequently absent father, and three lost siblings, as well as her fierce love for Africa.
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Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years.
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Traces the author’s decision to quit her job and travel the world for a year after suffering a midlife crisis and divorce, an endeavor that took her to three places in her quest to explore her own nature, experience fulfillment, and learn the art of spiritual balance.
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Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.
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After stumbling upon his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork and being blamed for the killing, fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone, an autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, decides to track down the real killer and turns to his detective hero to help him with the investigation, which brings him face to face with a family crisis.
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Unaware of the long-standing grievances harbored by their divorced parents, three adult siblings embark on a tumultuous summer when the oldest, a successful Manhattan doctor, investigates his sister’s chromosomal disorder against his mother’s wishes.
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The co-author relates how he was held under plantation-style slavery until he fled in the 1960s and suffered homelessness for an additional eighteen years before the wife of the other co-author, an art dealer accustomed to privilege, intervened.
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A memoir of a New York City summer during the waning days of World War II recounts how the University of Iowa coed author and her best friend became the first women to work on the sales floor at Tiffany & Co., a job during which they basked in period culture, from USO dances and the Stork Club to nickel subway rides and the Eisenhower parade.
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From the unsettled lives of a small-town teacher struggling to raise two boys alone in the face of their mother’s retreat from life, a pregnant teenage girl with nowhere to go, and two elderly bachelor farmers emerges a new vision of life and family as their diverse destinies intertwine.
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The author traces the boyhood enthusiasm for rockets that eventually led to a career at NASA, describing how he built model rockets in the family garage in West Virginia, inspired by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik.
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The author recounts the story of her life, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia and escape from a forced marriage to her efforts to promote women’s rights while surviving numerous threats to her safety.
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Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.
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Traces the unlikely friendship of Amir, a wealthy Afghanistani youth, and a servant’s son, in a tale that spans the final days of the nation’s monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.
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Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in war-torn Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage.
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When a plantation proprietor and former slave — now possessing slaves of his own — dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.
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A thought-provoking portrait of world-renowned infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Farmer follows the efforts of this unconventional Harvard genius to understand the world’s great health, economic, and social problems and to bring healing to humankind.
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Follows the author’s family’s efforts to live on locally- and home-grown foods, an endeavor through which they learned lighthearted truths about food production and the connection between health and diet.
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Traces the events that surrounded the 1984 murder of a woman and her child by fundamentalist Mormons Ron and Dan Lafferty, exploring the belief systems and traditions, including polygamy, that mark the faith’s most extreme factions and what their practices reflect about the nature of religion in America.
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Sixty years after a book’s publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl, named for one of the book’s characters, seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother’s loneliness.
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One of the world’s oldest living craniopagus conjoined twins at the approach of her thirtieth birthday, bookish Rose Darlen attempts to pen her autobiography while remembering the joys and challenges of her life with sister Ruby, with whom she shares friendships in their small hometown.
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A compelling account of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 brings together the divergent stories of two very different men who played a key role in shaping the history of the event — visionary architect Daniel H. Burnham, who coordinated its construction, and Dr. Henry H. Holmes, an insatiable and charming serial killer who lured women to their deaths.
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The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.
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An award-winning journalist traces a year during which she and her partner struggled with a pledge to avoid consumer spending practices in spite of their American conditioning, an effort that had a profound impact on their careers, family relationships, and personal identities.
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NEW! — The 2009 One Book, One County Selection
Over the course of a single summer, thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley, a young boy with a fascination for the sea, copes with the trials of growing up, his infatuation with the girl next door, bickering parents, and his fear that his life and his beloved Puget Sound are slipping away from him.
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Set in an Oz where a morose Wizard battles suicidal thoughts, the story of the green-skinned Elphaba, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West, profiles her as an animal rights activist striving to avenge her dear sister’s death.
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Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper’s son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain.
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Working in Gaborone, Botswana, sleuth Precious Ramotswe investigates several local mysteries, including a search for a missing boy and the case of the clinic doctor with different personalities for different days of the week.
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In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.
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In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which leads her on a lifelong search for truth and absolution.
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An ardent nature lover describes her unique friendship with a pig named Christopher Hogwood, a once sickly piglet who helped her develop a new relationship with neighbors in her small-town community that gave her an anchor to family and home.
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The author of The Center of Everything presents a tale about the complicated interactions between mothers and daughters who unwittingly inflict harm on one another in spite of their best intentions.
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Traces how the author, having been rescued and resuscitated by Himalayan villagers after a failed attempt to climb K2, worked to build schools that would particularly benefit the young girls who were forbidden an education by Taliban restrictions, an endeavor for which his life has been repeatedly threatened.
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Traces the author’s discovery of a half-frozen kitten in the drop-box of her small-community Iowa library and the feline’s development into an affable library mascot whose intuitive nature prompted hundreds of abiding friendships.
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A fictional tale inspired by the life of Marie Antoinette presents the story of a teenage empress’s daughter who is forced to leave her family home to marry the future king of France and who rebels against the formality and rigid protocol of court life.
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Published more than sixty years following the author’s death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts — “A Storm in June,” set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and “Dolce,” set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
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A coming-of-age memoir by a Vietnamese American recounts her struggles for an American identity in the pre-politically correct climate of the Midwest and her passion for American food in the face of her family’s Buddhist lifestyle.
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A lyrical study of friendship, love, and loss chronicles the evolving relationship between Veronika, a young New Zealand writer struggling with a recent tragedy and trying to finish her novel, and Astrid, an older, reclusive neighbor who offers comfort in the form of companionship and home-cooked meals, in a debut novel set against the backdrop of small-town Sweden.
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A story told from five different points of view — a mother receiving the evacuation order, her daughter on the train ride to the camp, the son in the desert internment camp, the family’s return home, and the final release of the father after years in captivity — chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.
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Twenty-seven-year-old Sarah Graham travels to a tiny hamlet in New York following the death of her estranged father to claim her inheritance, only to learn that his will stipulates a six-month stay before she can collect the money.
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Having moved from one academic outpost to another throughout her childhood at the side of her aphorism-prone father, Blue van Meer attends the elite St. Gallway School in her senior year, where she falls in with a charismatic group of friends before the deaths of a teacher and student awaken her analytical instincts.
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Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.
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In the aftermath of a horrific small-town school shooting, lawyer Jordan McAfee finds himself defending a youth who desperately needs someone on his side, while intrepid detective Patrick DuCharme works with a primary witness in the daughter of the superior court judge assigned to the case.
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Coming of age in a post-Civil War New York City tenement flat, Jewish-Russian Freydeh juggles multiple jobs to earn passage for her beloved family, an endeavor that is compromised when she learns that her younger sister is adrift somewhere in the city. .
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The founder of the Kabul Beauty School describes the lives of women in the patriarchal society of Afghanistan from the perspective of the school and its students, offering profiles of such women as a newlywed who must fake her own virginity, a child bride sold into marriage to pay her family’s debts, and the wife of a Taliban member who pursues her training despite her husband’s abuse.
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A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author’s works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.
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In September 1943, fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father flee across the Alps into Italy with thousands of other Jewish refugees seeking safety, only to find an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allied forces, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italians struggling to survive the harsh realities of World War II.
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The acclaimed journalist offers a heartwarming memoir of life with his father, describing growing up in the 1950s in working-class Buffalo with his extraordinary father, a proud WWII veteran, as well as the influence of his Catholic upbringing, his passion for sports, and the importance of hard work, responsibility, and patriotism.
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An evocative story of friendship set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century China in which women suffered from foot binding, isolation, and illiteracy follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.
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Having spent six decades creating a series of alternate lives designed to bring her fame and fortune while hiding the truth about her tragic past, reclusive and enigmatic Vida Winter finds herself torn by young Margaret Lea’s simple request for the truth about her own birth.
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In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation.
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Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project against a backdrop of the budding civil rights era.
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Ambitious teen Nella Castelluca, the daughter of a hard-working family from a small Italian village in Pennsylvania, aspires to live in genteel society far from the rigors of farm life, a dream that is compromised when a poet she loves disappears under scandalous circumstances and then returns just before Nella’s marriage to another man.
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A new novel by the author of Bombay Time vividly captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two compelling women — Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class parsi housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.
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The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family’s nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.
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In her first case, private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.
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A tale reminiscent of “Hamlet” that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father’s death.
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Four years after his daughter is abducted and evidence of her murder is found in an abandoned shack, Mackenzie Allen Philips returns to the shack in response to a note claiming to be from God, and has a life-changing experience.
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Living with a foster family in Germany during World War II, a young girl struggles to survive her day-to-day trials through stealing anything she can get her hands on, but when she discovers the beauty of literature, she realizes that she has been blessed with a gift that must be shared with others, including the Jewish man hiding in the basement.
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