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Car Thief
by Theodore Weesner
Alex Housman is a kid who at the age of sixteen has had fourteen cars, harbors
many hurts, and seems to fade into his environment while raging inside.
His father is an alcoholic, losing his grip on life even as he wants the
best for his son.
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Memory Keeper's
Daughter
by Kim Edwards
On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver
his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter
is born, he sees immediately that she has Down's Syndrome. Rationalizing
it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split-second decision
that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the
baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret.
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Moloka'i
by Alan Brennert
Young Rachel Kalama, growing up in idyllic Honolulu in the 1890s, is part
of a big, loving Hawaiian family, and dreams of seeing the far-off lands
that her father, a merchant seaman, often visits. But at the age of seven,
Rachel and her dreams are shattered by the discovery that she has leprosy.
Forcibly removed from her family, she is sent to Kalaupapa, the isolated
leper colony on the island of Moloka'i.
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My Sister's
Keeper
by Jodi Picoult
Conceived in vitro, 13-year-old Anna Fitzgerald has decided to sue her parents
to stop them from using her as "spare parts" for her older sister,
Kate, who suffers from leukemia. After years of having her bone marrow and
blood used to keep Kate alive, Anna now refuses to donate a kidney and strives
for her own personal freedom.
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The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.
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Three Junes
by Julia Glass
This artfully constructed debut novel is told in three parts, each set in
the month of June. As she tells the tales of love, loss, and the bonds between
members of a complicated Scottish family, Julia Glass poignantly explores
the role of fate and serendipity in bringing people together, as well as
the communication gaps and shuttered emotions that often keep them apart.
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American
Pastoral, Philip Roth
American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall -
of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces
of social disorder. His precocious daughter grows up to be a revolutionary
terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise. |
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Blessings,
Anna Quindlen
Richly written, deeply moving, beautifully crafted, Blessings tells the
story of Skip Cuddy, caretaker of the estate, who finds a baby asleep
in that box and decides he wants to keep her, and of matriarch Lydia Blessing,
who, for her own reasons, decides to help him.
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Catch
22, Joseph Heller
Catch-22 moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously
funny and strangely affecting. It is totally original. It is the story
of World War II flier John Yossarian who decides that his only mission
each time he goes up is to return—alive!
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Chocolate
War, Robert Cormier
A high school freshman discovers the devastating consequences of refusing
to join in the school's annual fund raising drive and arousing the wrath
of the school bullies.
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Confederacy
of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Awarded the Pulitzer Prize, this wildly inventive comic masterpiece features
one of the most unforgettable characters in modern fiction: Ignatius Reilly,
a mammoth misfit Medievalist hilariously at odds with the 20th-century world.
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Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
" Literary self-consciousness and technical invention mix unexpectedly
in this engaging memoir by Eggers, editor of the literary magazine McSweeney's
and the creator of a satiric 'zine called Might, who subverts the conventions
of the memoir by questioning his memory, motivations and interpretations
so thoroughly that the form itself becomes comic.” Publisher’s
Weekly
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Invisible
Man, Ralph Ellison
This is the “searing story of a black man's fervent quest for personal
identity and social visibility that takes him on a journey through the Southern
U.S. and later to New York City.
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Member
of the Wedding, Carson McCullers
This is an achingly real novel about Frankie Addams, a bored twelve-year-old
madly jealous of her brother's impending marriage.
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East of Eden, John Steinbeck
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
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Ragtime,
E.L. Doctorow
Three tales are relayed as separate stories initially, and then are interwoven
gradually. The families' stories: that of rich white people, blacks from
Harlem, and immigrant Jews, capture the spirit of the country in this era
(1906-1915), and examine the shimmering, shattering forces that converged,
evoking wonder as well as terror, in an age when everything seemed possible.
Doctorow reminds readers that our life is not one "story." Rather,
we are who we are because of the combination of our experiences.
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Runner,
Cynthia Voight
It was the 1960s, the time of the Vietnam War. "Bullet" Tillerman,
the school track star, had to decide if he would go to fight or stay on
the family farm. Bullet's father, who had already driven Bullet's older
brother and sister out of the house, made impossible demands on him. And
his mother seemed to have lost the will to resist the old man. Meanwhile,
at school, a black student joined the track team, forcing Bullet to question
his own prejudices. But nothing would keep him from running. Nothing.
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Seabiscuit:
an American legend, Laura Hillenbrand
Seabiscuit was an unlikely champion. But, thanks to the efforts of three
men, Seabiscuit became one of the most spectacular performers in sports
history. The rags-to-riches horse emerged as an American cultural icon,
drawing an immense following and becoming the single biggest newsmaker of
1938 -- receiving more coverage than FDR or Hitler. Laura Hillenbrand beautifully
renders this story of one horse's journey from also-ran to national luminary.
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Shipping
News, Annie Proulx
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary
North American family. When Quoyle's two-timing wife meets her just deserts,
he retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly
beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters and
family members all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life.
As Quoyle confronts his private demons -- and the unpredictable forces of
nature and society -- he begins to see the possibility of love without pain
or misery.
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Whale
Talk, Chris Crutcher
“Crutcher captures perfectly the emotions and humor of teens facing
injustices. His sensitive treatment imparts dignity and depth to kids that
are different while telling one whale of an entertaining story.” Children’s
Literature
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Elements of
Style
by Wendy Wasserstein
A scathing comedy about New York's high society facing the post—9/11
world.
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Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that
will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find
the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who
died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly
impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts
on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.
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Joe College
by Tom Perrotta
For many college students, spring break means fun and sun in Florida. For
Danny, a Yale junior, it means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach,
his father's lunch truck, which plies the parking lots of office parks in
central New Jersey.
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Twelve
by Nick McDonell
A disturbing portrait of over-privileged, alienated teens on Manhattan's
Upper East Side, this debut novel displays keen insights into human behavior
from an astonishingly young author who wrote it during his senior year in
high school.
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Alienist
by Caleb Carr
A society-born police reporter and an enigmatic abnormal psychologist--the
``alienist'' of the title--are recruited in 1896 by New York's reform police
commissioner Teddy Roosevelt to track down a serial killer who is slaughtering
boy prostitutes. The investigators are opposed at every step by crime bosses
and the city's hidden rulers (including J. Pierpont Morgan); they distrust
the alienist's novel methods and would rather conceal evidence of the murders
than court publicity. Tension builds as the detectives race to prevent more
deaths. |
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Bee
Season, Myla Goldberg
Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to
fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his
study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's
spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. When
Miriam's secret life triggers a familial explosion, it is Eliza who must
order the chaos. |
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Chosen,
Chaim Potok
The Chosen is the now-classic story of two fathers and two sons and the
pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way
that is best suited to each.
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Civil
Action, Jonathan Harr
This book chronicles a lawsuit brought in 1986 by eight families in Woburn,
Massachusetts, against Beatrice Foods and W.R. Grace. The plaintiffs charged
that toxic waste on properties owned by the giant corporations had infiltrated
town drinking water and caused an outbreak of leukemia.
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First
Part Last, Angela Johnson
Winner of the 2004 Coretta Scott King Award and the Printz Award, First
Part Last is the compassionate story of a teenage father in New York City.
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Old
School, Tobias Wolff
Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has
learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing
as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything
he's achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have
predicted.
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Separate
Peace, John Knowles
Knowles' classic story of two friends at boarding school during World War
II--one of the most starkly moving parables ever written about the dark
forces that brood over the tortured world of adolescence--has been a consistent
seller for more than 20 years.
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Walden,
Henry David Thoreau
Walden explores not only the soul of the searching Thoreau, but defines
what it means to be a truly free person, and distills the essence of our
relationship with Nature. |
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I Am Charlotte
Simmons
by Tom Wolfe
Dupont University--the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's
youth. . . Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a
freshman from Sparta, North Carolina (pop. 900), who has come here on full
scholarship in full flight from her tobacco-chewing, beer-swilling high
school classmates. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting dismay, that
Dupont is closer in spirit to Sodom than to Athens, and that sex, crank,
and kegs trump academic achievement every time.
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The Heart
Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
At the 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.
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Beach Music
by Pat Conroy
Beach Music is about Jack McCall, an American living in Rome with
his young daughter, trying to find peace after the recent trauma of his
wife's suicide. But his solitude is disturbed by the appearance of his sister-in-law,
who begs him to return home, and of two school friends asking for his help
in tracking down another classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester
and never resurfaced. These requests launch Jack on a journey that encompasses
the past and the present in both Europe and the American South, and that
leads him to shocking - and ultimately liberating - truths. |
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A
Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines
Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying
is an "enormously moving" ("Los Angeles Times") novel
of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man
who visits him in his cell. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they
both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--the
expected. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
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Beloved,
Toni Morrison
Winner of the 1988 Pulitizer Prize for fiction, “[Beloved] is the
story—set in post-Civil War Ohio—of Sethe, an escaped slave
who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who
has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and
not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe
lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her
mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls
herself Beloved.” |
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Blackberries,
Blackberries, Crystal E. Wilkinson
A collection of lyrical short stories about women from Kentucky.
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Cold
Mountain, Charles Frazier
"This monumental novel is set at the end of the Civil War and follows
the journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman as he returns home.
Interwoven is the story of Ada, the woman he loves.” Library Journal
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Cold
Sassy Tree, Olive Ann Burns
A timeless, funny, resplendent novel about romance and adolescence, and
how people lived and died in a small Southern town at the turn of the century.
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Color
Purple, Alice Walker
Winner of the American Book Ward and the Pulitzer Prize, and the basis for
a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, Color Purple is the story of Celie,
an African American woman who is one of those American heroes who came to
recognize herself recovering her identity and rescuing her life in spite
of the disfiguring effects of a particularly dreadful and personal sort
of oppression.
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Ellen
Foster, Kaye Gibbons
The story of an eleven-year-old orphan, driven to desperation by some of
the wickedest relatives in literary history, this is the story of her battle
for survival. Wise, funny and affectionate. |
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Gone
with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
A monumental classic considered by many to be not only the greatest love
story ever written, but also the greatest Civil War saga. |
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Lords
of Discipline, Pat Conroy
In this powerful, mesmerizing, and highly acclaimed bestseller, PAT CONROY
sweeps us into the turbulent world of four young men–friends, cadets,
and blood brothers–and their days of hazing, heartbreak, pride, betrayal,
and, ultimately, humanity. |
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Roots,
Alex Haley
This "bold...extraordinary...blockbuster..." (Newsweek magazine)
begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two centuries
later at a funeral in Arkansas. And in that time span, an unforgettable
cast of men, women, and children come to life, many of them based on the
people from Alex Haley's own family tree.
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Secret
Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd
This story takes place in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, in Sylvan,
S.C. Lily (14 years old) and her friend and servant Rosaleen flee Lily’s
abusive father and police who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right
to vote. Three black sisters take them in and Lily discovers her past and
herself through sincere and loving friendships.
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And
Ladies of the Club, Helen Hooven Santmyer
" A warm, evocative, often hilarious picture of society, culture, politics
and family life." --Atlanta Journal-Constitution This novel centers
on the members of a book club and their struggles to understand themselves,
each other, and the tumultuous world they live in - that is a small town
in Ohio during the late 1800's and early 1900's..
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Peace Like
a River
by Leif Enger
Set in the early 1960s, Enger's debut novel is narrated by eleven-year-old
Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy whose close-knit family is broken apart after
the oldest son, Davy, commits a crime of passion and becomes a fugitive.
Reuben, his father and younger sister become immersed in a series of mystical
events as they follow Davy's trail across the northern United States. |
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Beet
Queen, Louise Erdrich
On a spring morning in 1932, young Karl and Mary Adare arrive by boxcar
in Argus, North Dakota. Orphaned in a most peculiar way, Karl and Mary look
for refuge to their mother's sister Fritzie, who with her husband, Pete,
run a butcher shop. So begins an exhilarating 40-year saga brimming with
unforgettable characters.
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Glass
Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
Williams has created Tom, a young man thrust into the working world to support
his family leaving him no time to pursue his passion for writing. The story
is about a dysfunctional family who lives in St. Louis during the Great
Depression.
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Patty
Jane’s House of Curl, Lorna Landvik
Patty Jane's House of Curl is an easy-to-read, joyous and funny
story of a family of women, the tragedies in their lives, the strengths
they find within themselves, and their ultimate victories. It follows the
lives of two wacky Minnesota sisters, Patty Jane and Harriet, in a female
Lake Wobegon where humor and hope overcome life's trials. |
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Letting Loose
the Hounds
by Brady Udall
Set in the small towns of Utah and Arizona, most of these stories deal with
letting loose - or wanting to - in all its forms.
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Song of the
Lark
by Willa Cather
Thea Kronborg, an aspiring singer, struggles to escape from the confines
her small Colorado town to the world of possibility in the Metropolitan
Opera House.
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The Winemaker's
Daughter
by Timothy Egan
In a tale about a vineyard set in the Cascade Mountain basin east of Seattle,
Eagan is able to tell of clashing cultures (farmers vs. Native Americans,
new residents vs. old timers); the tragedies brought on by a four-year drought,
fire and greed; and the story of a family.
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Gone
Fishin’, Walter Mosley
The setting: Houston, 1939. Easy and Mouse are young men just setting out
in life. Both young men take a closer look at their love and memories of
their mothers and are forced to deal with the fathers in their lives. Out
of these memories and interactions, each must somehow forge his own sense
of manhood.
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Grapes
of Wrath, John Stienbeck
Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation
of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one
Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and
forced to travel west to the promised land of California.
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Leaping
Man Hill, Carol Emshwiller
Leaping Man Hill tells the story of Abel, an impish, mute child; of Mary
Catherine, whose eccentricities trigger new spirit in him; and of Henny,
a World War I veteran. These and other characters come to life amid Emshwiller's
rich country landscape.
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Lonesome
Dove, Larry McMurtry
Bestselling winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Lonesome Dove is an American
classic. A love story, an adventure, an American epic, Lonesome Dove embraces
all the West -- legend and fact, heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies,
Indians and settiers -- in a novel that recreates the central American experience,
the most enduring of our national myths. |
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O
Pioneers, Willa Cather
O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent
and clear-headed young woman whose passionate faith in the Nebraska prairie
makes her a wealthy landowner. |
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Plainsong,
Kent Haruf
Haruf illustrates how relationships are formed and what makes them last,
how responsibility and accountability make people good, and how cooperation
can make a small town strong in times of conflict. A fast, encouraging,
enlightening read, Plainsong is beautiful, real, and wise: a true great
American novel.
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