A Prayer for Owen Meany

The Last Song

Nicholas Sparks · 390 pages

#1 bestselling author Nicholas Sparks's new novel is at once a compelling family drama and a heartrending tale of young love.Seventeen year old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alientated from her parents, especially her father...until her

Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

The Round House

Louise Erdrich · 352 pages

A young man is upended after a violent attack on his mother, which leaves his family in turmoil. Well-written page turner that is hard to put down!

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

Robert Dugoni · 448 pages

Purple Hibiscus

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 307 pages

“One of the most vital and original novelists of her generation.” —Larissa MacFarquhar, The New Yorker From the bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded fro

The Outsiders

S.E. Hinton · 192 pages

According to Ponyboy, there are two kinds of people in the world: greasers and socs. A soc (short for "social") has money, can get away with just about anything, and has an attitude longer than a limousine. A greaser, on the other hand, always lives on the outside and needs to watch his back. Ponyboy is a greaser, and he's always been proud of it, even willing to rumble against a gang of socs f

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer · 326 pages

A new novel by the author of Everything Is Illuminated introduces Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old son of a man killed in the World Trade Center bombing who searches the city for a lock that fits a black key his father left behind. Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tendern

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski · 566 pages

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.

North and South

Elizabeth Gaskell · 450 pages

When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. Thi

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · 258 pages

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature, with over two million copies sold in this country. This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior

A Separate Peace

John Knowles · 196 pages

Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.

The Year of the Rat

Clare Furniss · 306 pages

I always thought you'd know, somehow, if something terrible was going to happen. I thought you'd sense it, like when the air goes damp and heavy before a storm and you know you'd better hide yourself away somewhere safe until it all blows over. But it turns out it's not like that at all. There's no scary music playing in the background like in films. No warning signs. Not even a lonely magpie. One

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · 426 pages

From Wikipedia: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (ISBN 0-330-48455-9) is a memoir by Dave Eggers released in 2000. It chronicles his stewardship of younger brother Christopher "Toph" Eggers following the cancer-related deaths of his parents. The book was an enormous commercial and critical success, reaching number one on The New York Times bestseller list and being nominated as a final

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson · 256 pages

**WINNER OF THE 2005 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION** In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civi

The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward · 274 pages

They heard it on the radio. A hurricane is coming, threatening the town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Esch's hard-drinking father can feel it in his bones. Esch and her brothers are trying to help prepare, but there are other worries too. Skeetah is watching his prized pit bull, helpless as her new litter dies one by one. Randall, when not preoccupied with basketball, is busy looking after the you

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri · 304 pages

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, c

One Day

David Nicholls · 437 pages

‘I can imagine you at forty,’ she said, a hint of malice in her voice. ‘I can picture it right now.’ He smiled without opening his eyes. ‘Go on then.’ 15th July 1988. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways. So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year whic

In the Unlikely Event

Judy Blume · 512 pages

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and

The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

We Begin at the End

Chris Whitaker · 400 pages

There are two kinds of families: the ones we are born into and the ones we create. Walk has never left the coastal California town where he grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. Now, thirty years later, Vincent is being released. Duchess is a

I Know This Much Is True

Wally Lamb · 912 pages

E-book extra: "Who Is Wally Lamb?" The author recalls events surrounding the acclaimed publication of I Know This Much Is True. ( Not available in print editions of this work.)Wally Lamb's masterful novel of transgression and redemption, now in e-book format.A contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth: a proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth inst

The Usual Rules

Joyce Maynard · 400 pages

"It's a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn - a perfect September day. Wendy's heading to school, eager to make plans with her best friend, worried about how she looks, mad at her mother for not letting her visit her father in California, impatient with her little brother and with the almost too-loving concern of her jazz musician stepfather. She's out the door to catch the bus. An hour later comes the ne