The Nature of Fragile Things

The Kitchen God's Wife

Amy Tan · 532 pages

Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past--including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s,

Broken Glass Park

Alina Bronsky · 221 pages

Seventeen-year-old Sacha Naimann dreams of writing a novel about her mother and killing the man who murdered her, Sacha's stepfather Vadim, while struggling to care for her younger siblings and leave behind her painful childhood.

The Stars Are Fire

Anita Shreve · 241 pages

"In October, 1947, after a summer-long drought, fires began near Bar Harbor and raced along the coast of Maine, ravaging two hundred thousand acres--the largest fire in Maine's history. In the southern part of the state, people were forced into the sea to escape the flames. Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband Gene joins the volunteers figh

The Boston Girl

Anita Diamant · 322 pages

A story "about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's in

Infidel

Ayaan Hirsi Ali · 353 pages

"Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.--From publisher description."--From source other than the Library of Congress

Honolulu

Alan Brennert · 439 pages

Outrun the Moon

Stacey Lee · 416 pages

San Francisco, 1906: Fifteen-year-old Mercy Wong is determined to break from the poverty in Chinatown, and an education at St. Clare s School for Girls is her best hope. Although St. Clare s is off-limits to all but the wealthiest white girls, Mercy gains admittance through a mix of cunning and a little bribery, only to discover that getting in was the easiest part. Not to be undone by a bunch of

Life of Pi

Yann Martel · 336 pages

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan… and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary works of fiction in recent years.

Black Cake

Charmaine Wilkerson · 385 pages

How to Read the Air

Dinaw Mengestu · 312 pages

Leaving behind his marriage and job in New York, Jonas, the son of Ethiopian immigrants, sets out to retrace his mother and father's trip and weave together a family history that will take him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to his life in the America of today.

Second Class Citizen

Buchi Emecheta · 175 pages

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 400 pages

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of w

My Ántonia

Willa Cather · 246 pages

My Antonia, first published 1918, is one of Willa Cather's greatest works. It is the last novel in the Prairie trilogy, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.My Antonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Antonia. The book'

The Hungry Ghosts

Shyam Selvadurai · 378 pages

Shivan Rassiah, a Canadian man in his early thirties, prepares to leave his home in Toronto to visit his dying grandmother in Sri Lanka. Much is riding on this trip for Shivan, who hopes it will bring the renewal he so desperately needs.

We Come Apart

Sarah Crossan, Brian Conaghan · 336 pages

Love from the Ashes

Denise A. Agnew · 337 pages

During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, privileged Grace Wyne and Irish immigrant Nathaniel Dempsey fall in love. They seek a new life together, but society, her family, and nature itself, wage war against them. Their forbidden love is a sure formula for disaster.

The Magician's Lie

Greer Macallister · 320 pages

The Amazing Arden is the most famous female illusionist of her day, renowned for her notorious trick of sawing a man in half on stage. One night in Waterloo, Iowa, with young policeman Virgil Holt watching from the audience, she swaps her trademark saw for a fire ax. Is it a new version of the illusion, or an all-too-real murder? When Arden's husband is found lifeless beneath the stage later that

Dreams of Joy

Lisa See · 354 pages

A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.

Deeply Devoted

Maggie Brendan · 332 pages

When Catharine Olsen leaves Holland for America as a mail-order bride, she brings along some extra baggage: two sisters, her mother's set of Blue Willow china, and a tragic past. When she arrives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, she promptly marries Peter Andersen and dreams of starting life over in this rugged land. Peter is kind and patient with Catharine and accommodating to her sisters. His mother, howev

The Briar Club

Kate Quinn · 432 pages

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfec

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 256 pages

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once

The Henna Artist (First Time Trade)

Alka Joshi · 368 pages

Now

Morris Gleitzman · 184 pages

While her physician-parents are working in Africa, eleven-year-old Zelda is living with her grandfather, eighty-year-old Holocaust-survivor Felix Salinger, in Australia, when a disaster leads them both to deal with unresolved feelings about the first Zelda, Felix's childhood friend.

Kvinnan på tåget

Paula Hawkins · 396 pages