Each bag is available for an extended check-out period (Six weeks suggested; please see staff member when checking out) and is reservable in advance by contacting Ali Ewing at 616-784-2016×2179 or e-mailing aewing@kdl.org. Bags can be picked up and returned at any KDL branch.
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The Double Bind: A Novel by Chris Bohjalian
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson
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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My Ántonia by Willa Cather
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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The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Things We Couldn't Say by Diet Eman
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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Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
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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One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus
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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The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
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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The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
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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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
NEW! 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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Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Water for Elephants: A Novel by Sara Gruen
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
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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Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies. |
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Plainsong by Kent Haruf
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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Rocket Boys / October Sky by Homer Hickam
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 Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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The Known World: A Novel by Edward P. Jones
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
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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The History of Love: A Novel by Nicole Krauss
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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The Girls by Lori Lansens
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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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
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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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
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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Life of Pi by Yann Martel
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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The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood by Sy Montgomery
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund
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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Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
NEW! 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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Stealing Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir by Bich Minh Nguyen
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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Astrid and Veronika by Linda Olsson
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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When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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My Sister's Keeper: A Novel by Jodi Picoult
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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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A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
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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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel by Lisa See
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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The Queen of the Big Time: A Novel by Adriana Trigiani
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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The Space Between Us: A Novel by Thrity Umrigar
NEW! 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.
Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies |
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The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
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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Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
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. |