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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis
December 2012 Traces the story of Great Migration-era mother Hattie Shepherd, who in spite of poverty and a dysfunctional husband uses love and Southern remedies to raise nine children and prepare them for the realities of a harsh world.
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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
June 2012 Traces the personal crisis the author endured after the death of her mother and a painful divorce, which prompted her ambition to undertake a dangerous 1,100-mile solo hike that both drove her to rock bottom and helped her to heal.
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A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: Two Novels by Charles Dickens
December 2010 Presents the classic tale of love, courage, and sacrifice set against the cataclysmic events of the French Revolution, and the story of the orphan Pip and his rise in Victorian society when a mysterious benefactor allows him to be educated as a gentleman.
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Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
September 2010 The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.
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Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan
September 2009 A collection of works builds on the author’s 2005 tale, “An Ex-mas Feast,” as previously published in The New Yorker and is complemented by such culturally relevant tales as “My Parents’ Bedroom,” “Luxurious Hearses,” and “What Language Is That?”
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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel by David Wroblewski
September 2008 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, in a tale reminiscent of “Hamlet.”
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A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle
January 2008 Contends that humanity has an unprecedented opportunity to shift from its dangerous, ego-based state of consciousness to a saner, more loving existence, and offers practical advice on how to promote kindness and freedom.
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The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
November 2007 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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Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
October 2007 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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Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides
June 2007 Calliope’s friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparents’ desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
March 2007 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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The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography by Sidney Poitier
January 2007 The acclaimed actor reveals the passion, spirituality, and intellectual fervor that have driven his life and career, citing the elements of his childhood that gave him his sense of worth and ethics.
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Night by Elie Wiesel
January 2006 The narrative of a boy who lived through Auschwitz and Buchenwald provides a short and terrible indictment of modern humanity.
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A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
September 2005 A memoir of drug and alcohol abuse and the rehabilitation experience examines addiction and recovery through the eyes of a man who had taken his addictions to deadly extremes, describing the battle to confront the consequences of his life.
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A Summer of Faulkner: As I Lay Dying / The Sound and the Fury / Light in August by William Faulkner
June 2005 Presents three novels, including As I Lay Dying, in which the Bundren family journeys across Mississippi to bury their mother, The Sound and the Fury, in which Caddy Compson’s story is narrated by her three brothers, and Light in August, in which the lives of several characters intersect in a small Mississippi town.
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The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
September 2004 A Chinese peasant overcomes the forces of nature and the frailties of human nature to become a wealthy landowner.
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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
May 2004 A new translation of the classic nineteenth-century Russian novel in which a young woman is destroyed when she attempts to live outside the moral law of her society.
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
April 2004 A quiet, sensitive girl searches for beauty in a small, but damned Southern town.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
January 2004 Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.
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Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
September 2003 A novel depicting the racial ferment in the beautiful country of South Africa in 1948.
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East of Eden by John Steinbeck
June 2003 The biblical account of Cain and Abel is echoed in the history of two generations of the Trask family in California.
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Sula by Toni Morrison
April 2002 The intense friendship shared by two African American women raised in an Ohio town changes when one of them leaves to roam the countryside and returns ten years later.
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Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
January 2002 Spanning five generations and moving from Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, to the bleak landscape of World War I, and to the emerging jazz scene in New York City, this epic tale tells the story of four sisters.
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A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
November 2001 In India during the mid-1970s, after a “state of internal emergency” is declared, four very different people—a widowed seamstress, a student, and a man and his nephew who have fled their village’s caste violence—find their lives becoming inextricably intertwined.
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The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
September 2001 Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he begins to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson’s disease.
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Cane River by Lalita Tademy
June 2001 Follows four generations of African American women from slavery to the early twentieth century as they struggle for economic security and the future of their families along the Cane River in rural Louisiana.
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Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir & Michèle Fitoussi
May 2001 The daughter of a former aide to the king of Morocco, who was executed after a failed assassination attempt on the ruler, describes how she, her five siblings, and her mother were imprisoned in a desert penal colony for twenty years.
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Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio
March 2001 After years of living in a children’s asylum for having spontaneous jerks and spasms, Icy returns home and is quickly befriended by Miss Emily, who cares for her and teachers her the ways of life, transforming Icy into a new person and forever changing her view of the world.
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We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
January 2001 The Mulvaneys, at first a close and very lucky family, drift apart over the years, until the youngest son, Judd, discovers the secret of their downfall and sets out to help reunite the family.
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House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III
November 2000 When a former colonel of the Iranian Air Force and his family purchase a small California home at auction, they are faced with a great conflict as the former owner and her police officer boyfriend fight to get it back at any cost.
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Drowning Ruth: A Novel by Christina Schwarz
September 2000 Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family’s rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and young niece, Ruth.
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Open House: A Novel by Elizabeth Berg
August 2000 Struggling to come to terms with her husband’s abandonment, Samantha sets out to construct a new life for herself and her eleven-year-old son and to rediscover her own identity, which had been lost in her attempts to save her marriage.
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The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
June 2000 Nathan Price, a evangelical Baptist who in 1959 has taken his wife and four daughters on a mission to the Belgian Congo, finds that their traditions are no longer secure in this very different world.
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While I Was Gone by Sue Miller
May 2000 Having moved on with her life after a friend was brutally murdered, Jo Becker is now married with a grown family, but when an old housemate moves into the neighborhood, Jo rekindles a relationship that takes her back to the past and threatens her future.
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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
April 2000 The story of Pecola Breedlove profiles an eleven-year-old Black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes and the tragedy that results from her longing to be accepted.
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Back Roads by Tawni O'Dell
March 2000 With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, nineteen-year-old Harley Altmyer is charged with caring for his three sisters in a backwards Pennsylvania coal town, but despite his fatherly responsibilities, he is still a teenage boy and lusts after the mother of two who lives down the road.
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Daughter of Fortune: A Novel by Isabel Allende
February 2000 Raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, after being abandoned as a baby, a pregnant Eliza follows her lover, Joaquín Andieta, to California at the height of the Gold Rush and finds adventure and adversity on her road to independence and love.
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Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage by Robert Morgan
January 2000 During their first year of marriage, Julie Harmon and Hank Richards move to Gap Creek, South Carolina, where a flood that nearly kills them tests the endurance of their relationship.
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A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton
December 1999 While under the care of Alice Goodwin, a neighbor’s child drowns in the Goodwins’ pond, a devastating accident that has profound repercussions for the entire Goodwin family, in a story set in a small Midwestern farm town.
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Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay
November 1999 Ellen Grier returns with her husband and children to their midwestern Catholic hometown to live with her narrow-minded in-laws, coping with the family’s eccentricity and confronting a hidden secret festering in her husband’s past.
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River, Cross My Heart: A Novel by Breena Clarke
October 1999 After the drowning death of their daughter in the Potomac River, a family leaves their rural North Carolina world in search of a better life among friends and relatives in Georgetown, as they grapple with their loss and struggle to move forward.
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Tara Road by Maeve Binchy
September 1999 Having met her soulmate in Joe Allbright, New York City debutante Kate Jamison reencounters him multiple times in the years that follow and suffers heartbreak when he remains unwilling to compromise on his dreams.
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Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes
June 1999 In a small Mississippi town during the late 1950s, Even Grade, a twenty-eight-year-old black man who grew up as an orphan, and Valuable Korner, the teenage white daughter of the local prostitute, search for love, family, and commitment.
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White Oleander by Janet Fitch
May 1999 The struggle to build an authentic identity lies at the heart of Astrid’s life as a foster child in Los Angeles after her poet mother, who has kept Astrid isolated from the world, is imprisoned for murder.
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The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve
March 1999 When her husband, a pilot, dies in an airplane crash off the Irish coast, Kathryn Lyons finds herself in the media spotlight as rumors abound of her husband’s shocking secret past.
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The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
February 1999 At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg falls in love with a woman who disappears, and while observing a trial as a law student years later, he is shocked to discover the same woman as the defendant in a horrible crime.
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Jewel by Bret Lott
January 1999 A mother fights for the dignity of her youngest daughter against the backdrop of a pure and simple way of life in the backwoods of Mississippi in 1943.
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Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts
December 1998 A pregnant teenager abandoned by her boyfriend in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, finds a new home with the eccentric and caring people of the community.
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Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
October 1998 In the winter of 1981, trapped by unpassable roads, midwife Sibyl Danforth makes a life-altering decision when she performs an emergency cesarean section on a woman she fears has died of a stroke.
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What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage
September 1998 A highly praised debut novel by an African-American playwright and essayist follows Ava Johnson’s discovery that she is HIV positive and her journey back to her sleepy North Michigan hometown, where she manages to find new love.
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I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
June 1998 Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation.
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Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
May 1998 At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that can only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her.
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Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen
April 1998 After her passionate marriage deteriorates into a violent nightmare, Fran Benedetto is forced to start a new life, complete with a new identity.
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Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman
March 1998 A middle-aged woman, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, returns to her small Massachusetts hometown for the funeral of the housekeeper who raised her and finds herself thrust into the lives of the people she left behind.
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Paradise by Toni Morrison
January 1998 Captures the dreams, memories, conflicts, and complex interior lives of the citizens of a small, all-black town as four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near the town during the 1970s, in a novel that blends past, present, and future.
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The Best Way to Play by Bill Cosby
December 1997 Little Bill and his friends, avid fans of the television show “Space Explorers,” clamor to get the video game version, but they find that they have more fun using their imagination while playing outside.
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The Treasure Hunt by Bill Cosby
December 1997 Little Bill finds that everyone has something special they can do except for him, but when Great-Grandma Alice pays a visit, he sees that he may just have a special talent of his very own!
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The Meanest Thing To Say by Bill Cosby
December 1997 When a new boy in class tries to get the other students to play a game that involves saying the meanest things possible to one another, Little Bill shows him a better way to make friends.
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A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons
October 1997 In alternating chapters, two ill-matched people—Jack Ernest Stokes and his wife, Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes—describe their lives together and apart.
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Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
October 1997 After the death of her mother, an eleven-year-old girl finds that life with her father is too dangerous and tries to find a new home.
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A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
September 1997 In 1948 Louisiana, a young teacher is asked to impart some of his own pride and learning to a young black man awaiting execution, only to come face to face with his own cynicism and hopelessness.
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Songs in Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris
June 1997 A novel set in a small town in Vermont in 1960 offers the story of lonely and vulnerable Marie Fermoyle, her three children, and a dangerous con man.
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The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou
May 1997 In the fourth volume of her autobiography, the author describes her experiences as a singer-dancer in New York and her impressions of the Civil Rights movement.
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The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds
April 1997 Ninah Huff, the teenage granddaughter of the founder of an isolated religious community, causes controversy when she is discovered to be pregnant with what she claims is a holy child.
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Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi
February 1997 Follows Trudi Montag, a dwarf who serves as her town’s librarian, unofficial historian, and recorder of the secret stories of her people, in a novel that charts the course of German history in the first half of the twentieth century.
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She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
January 1997 Overweight and sensitive Dolores Price grows from painful childhood, through excruciating adolescence, to lonely adulthood, experiencing the heartache of being a misfit in a confusing world.
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The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton
November 1996 Ruth, a young woman living in a rural Illinois town, looks back on the people who have shaped her life, including her runaway father, shrewish mother, and crazy husband.
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Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
October 1996 Macon Dead, Jr., called Milkman, son of the richest Negro in town, moves from childhood into early manhood, searching, among the disparate, mysterious members of his family, for his life and reality.
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The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard
September 1996 The disappearance of her three-year-old son Ben threatens to drive a wedge between Beth Cappadora and her husband, Pat, and transforms her older son into a troubled delinquent, until one day nine years later when Ben comes back into their lives.
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