The Hotel New Hampshire

The Red Tent

Anita Diamant · 321 pages

Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood--the world of the red tent. It begins with the story of her mothers--Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah--the f

Nothing Holds Back the Night

Delphine de Vigan · 346 pages

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic and in control of the Paris me

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley · 377 pages

This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s *King Lear* centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, *A Thousand Acres* takes on t

We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates · 464 pages

Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

Commonwealth

Ann Patchett · 322 pages

"One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six

A Spool of Blue Thread

Anne Tyler · 384 pages

"From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author--now in the fiftieth year of her remarkable career--a brilliantly observed, joyful and wrenching, funny and true new novel that reveals, as only she can, the very nature of a family's life. "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July

Fall on Your Knees

Ann-Marie MacDonald · 510 pages

Inside the O'Briens

Lisa Genova · 343 pages

Patrol officer Joe O'Brien is third-generation Irish in Charlestown. A tough cop with a soft interior, a loving wife and four adult children, Joe is diagnosed with Huntington's disease. As Joe's symptoms worsen and he's eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while his daughter Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a l

This is Where I Leave You

Jonathan Tropper · 376 pages

International bestseller Jonathan Tropper joins Dutton with the book his fans in the trade have been waiting for him to write: an uproarious, sophisticated, and deeply moving breakout novel.Those who have already discovered Jonathan Tropper have called his novels "hilarious, but emotion-packed,"1 "fantastically funny,"2 "surprisingly moving,"3 and "utterly magnificent."4 With his Dutton debut, Tro

The Lonely Polygamist

Brady Udall · 608 pages

Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, is having the mother of all mid-life crises. His construction business is failing, his family has grown into an overpopulated mini-dukedom beset with insurrection and rivalry, and he is done in with grief: due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son, he has come to doubt the capacity of his own heart

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

Those Who Save Us

Jenna Blum · 496 pages

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. Driven by

A Painted House

John Grisham · 465 pages

Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

The Bastard of Istanbul

Elif Shafak · 368 pages

Moloka'i

Alan Brennert · 389 pages

Seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family's 1890s Honolulu home when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her to reenter the world.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Kate Atkinson · 381 pages

The story of Ruby's own life is told in thirteen chapters, all written in the first person, documenting key periods in Ruby's life from 1951 to 1992. In between each chapter are (non-consecutive) flashbacks that tell the story from the point of view of one of the other (mostly female) members of Ruby's family—including her great-grandmother Alice, her grandmother Nell and her mother Bunty.

Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 320 pages

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the

Jade Legacy

Fonda Lee · 713 pages

A Raisin in the Sun

Lorraine Hansberry · 151 pages

This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicago's South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased husba