In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilty and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill--a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of bitterness and routine--where calculated cruelty is a way of life preserved and perpetuated in the service... View More...
"The greatest novel to emerge out of the tragedy of South Africa, and one of the best novels of our time." --The New Republic "A beautiful novel...its writing is so fresh, its projection of character so immediate and full, its events so compelling, and its understanding so compassionate that to read the book is to share intimately, even to the point of catharsis, in the grave human experience." --The New York Times An Oprah Book Club selection, Cry, the Beloved Country, was an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948. Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's count... View More...
A seductive and mesmerizing story of obsessive love from the New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic. After nineteen years in California, March Murray returns to the small Massachusetts town where she grew up. For all this time, March has been avoiding her own troubled history, but when she encounters Hollis--the boy she loved so desperately, the man who has never forgotten her--the past collides with the present as their reckless love is reignited. This dark romantic tale asks whether it is possible to survive a love that consumes you completely. The answers March Murray disco... View More...
Anita Shreve's hauntingly beautiful #1 bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection about tragedy, grief, betrayal, and the 'impossibility of knowing another person.'As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to expect both intense exhilaration and long periods alone, but nothing has prepared her for a late-night knock that lets her know her husband has died in a crash.Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-y... View More...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "Intimate and illuminating and, as is true of most anything Quindlen writes, well worth the read."--PeopleFor eighteen years Fran Benedetto kept her secret, hid her bruises. She stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father, and because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son's face, Fran finally made a choice--and ran for both their lives. Now she is starting over in a city far from home, far from Bobby. In this place she uses a name that isn't hers, watches over her son, and tries to for... View More...
In 1959, Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist, takes his four young daughters, his wife, and his mission to the Belgian Congo -- a place, he is sure, where he can save needy souls. But the seeds they plant bloom in tragic ways within this complex culture. Set against one of the most dramatic political events of the twentieth century -- the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium and its devastating consequences -- here is New York Times-bestselling author Barbara Kingslover's beautiful, heartbreaking, and unforgettable epic that chronicles the disintegration of family and a nation.... View More...
Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guardi... View More...
Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guardin... View More...
This easy-to-read story about peer pressure by comedian and storyteller Bill Cosby is now a Scholastic Reader Michael Reilly has introduced a new game to Little Bill and his friends. You get twelve chances to say something mean to another kid--and whoever comes up with the biggest insult is the winner. Insults start flying: "Jose hops with the frogs in science lab " "Andrew eats frogs for dinner " "Little Bill shoots baskets like a girl " Little Bill tries to think of really mean things to say in retaliation. But Dad teaches him a strategy that enables Little Bill to save face while remaining... View More...
The acclaimed bestseller -- a selection of Oprah's Book Club -- that brings vividly to life the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, circa 1925, and a community reeling from a young girl's tragic death.When five-year-old Clara Bynum drowns in the Potomac River under a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters, the community must reconcile themselves to the bitter tragedy.Clarke powerful charts the fallout from Clara's death on the people she has left behind: her parents, Alice and Willie Bynum, torn between the old world of their rural North Carolina home and... View More...
Jewel is the story of how quickly a life can change; how, like lightning, an unforeseen event can set us on a course without reason or compass. In the backwoods of Mississippi, a land of honeysuckle and grapevine, Jewel and her husband, Leston, are truly blessed; they have five fine children. When Brenda Kay is born in 1943, Jewel gives thanks for a healthy baby, last-born and most welcome. In this story of a woman's devotion to the child who is both her burden and God's singular way of smiling on her, Bret Lott has created a mother-daughter relationship of matchless intensity and beauty, and ... View More...
The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers... View More...
One of Dickens's greatest novels, "Great Expectations" is also one of his most autobiographical stories, as the young protagonist Pip escapes from his troubled childhood experiences to learn for himself the perils of love, the dangers of wealth, and how to sort his friends from his enemies. Just as Dickens never quite recovered from the traumas of the debtor's prison and child labor, so Pip learns that his early life cut more deeply than he realizes, with unavoidable consequences. Through the lives of its unforgettable charactersPip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham, Estella"Great Expectations" charts ... View More...
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLERAt twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State--and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the te... View More...
A sweeping, suspenseful coming-of-age tale from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, the beloved bestselling author hailed by Abraham Verghese as a "gifted storyteller" and by People magazine as a "skilled cartographer of the heart." Beloved bestselling author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has been hailed by Abraham Verghese as a "gifted storyteller" and by People magazine as a "skilled cartographer of the heart." Now, Divakaruni returns with her most gripping novel yet, a sweeping, suspenseful coming-of-age tale about a young woman who leaves India for America on a search that will transform her life. TH... View More...
A contemporary classic that has sold more than two million copies and was a selection of Oprah's original Book Club, Midwives is a compulsively readable novel that explores questions of human responsibility that are as fundamental to our society now as they were when the book was first published twenty years ago. On an icy winter night in an isolated house in rural Vermont, a seasoned midwife named Sibyl Danforth takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency cesarean section on a mother she believes has died of stroke. But what if--as Sibyl's assistant later char... View More...
"POWERFUL . . . SUSPENSEFUL . . . RICHLY TEXTURED . . . A] CHILLING, PRECOCIOUSLY GOOD START TO A BRIGHT NEW NOVELIST'S CAREER."-The New York Times" A] gripping psychological thriller . . . In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. . . . Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discover... View More...
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