| Book Group Genre List |
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Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. |
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James | Percival Everett A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. Thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. |
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The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club | Helen Simonson It is the summer of 1919 and Constance Haverhill has been asked to give up her cottage and her job at the estate she helped run during the war now that the men are back. She’s sent as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a seaside hotel. Constance is swept up in the social whirl of Hazelbourne-on-Sea, but things are more complicated than they seem in this sunny pocket of English high society. |
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Happiness for Beginners | Katherine Center A year after getting divorced, Helen Carpenter, thirty-two, lets her annoying younger brother talk her into signing up for a wilderness survival course. Thus begins the strangest adventure of Helen's well-behaved life: three weeks in the remotest wilderness of a mountain range in Wyoming where she will survive mosquito infestations, a surprise summer blizzard, a group of sorority girls, and her brother's even-more-annoying best friend. |
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A Brilliant Night of Stars and Ice | Rebecca Connolly Based on the remarkable true story of the Carpathia--the only ship and her legendary captain who answered the distress call of the sinking Titanic. Rostron's heroic and compassionate leadership, his methodical preparations for rescue, and his grit and determination to act honorably and selflessly to save lives and care for the survivors, sets the course for this awe-inspiring story. |
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1776 | David McCullough In this masterful book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence - when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper. |
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The Bookshop | Evan Friss An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations.
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The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post | Allison Pataki A child of the modest farmlands of the Midwest, Marjorie was inspired by a few simple rules: Always think for yourself, never take success for granted, and work hard--even when you're American royalty, even when you're dripping in imperial diamonds. From crawling through Moscow warehouses to rescue a tsar's treasures to outrunning the Nazis in London, from serving the homeless of the Great Depression to entertaining Kennedys, Roosevelts, and Hollywood's biggest stars, Marjorie lived an epic life few could imagine.
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The Anxious Generation | Jonathan Haidt An investigation into the collapse of youth mental health--and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time, investigates the nature of childhood, and issues a clear call to action to protect our children--and ourselves--from the psychological damage of a phone-based life. |
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The Small and the Mighty | Sharon McMahon A heartfelt, inspiring portrait of twelve ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country. Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn't make it into the textbooks. McMahon's cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free. |
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The Boys of Riverside | Thomas Fuller The incredible story of an all-deaf high school football team's triumphant climb from underdog to undefeated, their inspirational brotherhood, a fascinating portrait of deafness in America, and the indefatigable head coach who spearheaded the team. |
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Edenbrooke | Julianne Donaldson When Marianne receives an invitation to spend the summer with her twin sister in Edenbrooke, she has no idea of the romance and adventure that await her once she meets the dashing Sir Philip.
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The Women | Kristin Hannah Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation. She has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965 when her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. |
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How to Read a Book | Monica Wood When Violet Powell, Frank Daigle and Harriet Larson encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland, Maine their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways. |
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The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle | Stuart Turton Every day Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others. |
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The Anthropocene Reviewed | John Green The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. |
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Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone | Benjamin Stevenson Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate. I’m Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I’d killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let’s get started. |
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Miss Benson’s Beetle | Rachel Joyce It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson–a sensible schoolmarm and lonely spinster–is just trying to get through life. But one day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and her tidy, circumscribed life, to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia. |
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The Frozen River | Ariel Lawhon As a midwife and healer, Martha Ballard is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Her diary soon lands at the center of scandal, compelling Martha to decide where her loyalties lie. |
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The House in the Cerulean Sea | TJ Klune Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he’s given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside. |
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The Measure | Nikki Erlick It seems like any other day: You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live. From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean? As society comes together and pulls apart, everyone faces the same shocking choice: Do they wish to know how long they’ll live? |
Don't know what to read with your book club? Check out one of our sampler sets to get a varity of books in a specific genre to read.
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Sampler Set: Beach Reads This sampler set currently includes 12 of our favorite recently published “beach reads”. A nice mixture of romance, mystery, and drama, these titles offer a range of great reading options! Titles with a little less spice: Hello Stranger; Where’d You Go, Bernadette; The Invisible Husband of Frick Island; A Place Like Home; The Beach House; The Best Summer of Our Lives Titles with a little more spice: Beach Read; Killers of a Certain Age; Float Plan; The Ex Talk; Familia; This Bird Has Flown |
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Sampler Set: Historical Fiction This sampler set includes 12 of our favorite historical fiction titles from our regular book group collection. Each title has its own full set available, if you’d like to use the sampler to “research before you reserve”. Titles include: Where the Crawdads Sing, The Invention of Wings, Fountains of Silence, The Distant Hours, A Gentleman in Moscow, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, As Bright As Heaven, A Piece of the World, All the Light We Cannot See, The Snow Child, The Lost Letter, These Is My Words |
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Sampler Set: Holiday Romances This sampler set includes 6 of our favorite holiday romances. There are 2 copies of each title in the set, for a total 12 books to help your book group feel the joy of the holidays, no matter the time of year! Titles include: The Holiday Mix-up; The Christmas Cafe; Love, Holly; A Redbird Christmas; Three Holidays and a Wedding; The Matzah Ball |
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Sampler Set: Literary Ladies This sampler set includes 12 titles from some of our favorite female writers in the current literary world. This collection of ladies includes bestselling authors, Pulitzer Prize winners, and National Book Award winners. There’s plenty of food for thought here – the makings of a great discussion for book lovers! Authors include: Lauren Groff, Jesmyn Ward, Daisy Johnson, Olive Kitteridge, Tayari Jones, Louise Erdrich, Geraldine Brooks, Alice McDermott, Hanna Pylvainen, Sue Monk Kidd, Celeste Ng, Ann Patchett |
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Sampler Set: Mystery This sampler set gives your book group a chance to explore the mystery genre by solving not just one, but ten of our favorite mysteries! Titles include: Her Royal Spyness, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, The Thursday Murder Club, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Arsenic and Adobo, The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Eight Perfect Murders, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone |
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Sampler Set: Nonfiction This sampler set includes 12 of our favorite nonfiction titles from our regular book group collection. Titles include: Braiding Sweetgrass, The Day the World Came to Town, The Boys in the Boat, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, Guests of the Sheik, Same Kind of Different As Me, Survival Lessons, Call the Midwife, The Last Lecture, A Walk in the Woods, When Breath Becomes Air, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind |
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Sampler Set: Sci-Fi & Fantasy Looking to expand your horizons? This sampler set currently includes 11 of our favorite sci-fi/fantasy novellas, short novels that will allow your book group to explore several worlds of imagination by award-winning authors! Titles include: Piranesi; The Empress of Salt and Fortune; Cycle of the Werewolf; Stardust; All Systems Red; The Martian Chronicles; Annihilation; Animal Farm; Binti; This Is How You Lose the Time War; The Lottery and Other Stories |
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The Book Thief | Markus Zusak The Book Thief rotates around an unlikely pair: the narrator—death—and the young Liesel Meminger, whose father has disappeared for being a communist and whose mother soon vanishes. On the way to a foster home in Musling, Germany, her younger brother dies, and at the small grave side service, she steals a book from one of the grave diggers about how to dig graves. |
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The Bookish Life of Nina Hill | Abbi Waxman Nina Hill is comfortable in her life, she spends a lot of time alone, not talking to people. When the father she never knew dies, and leaves something to her in his will; suddenly her solitude is interrupted by sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, and cousins she never knew. |
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The Bookshop | Evan Friss An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations. |
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Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society | Mary Ann Shaffer On the tiny Channel island of Guernsey, an impromptu literary society is formed when four friends are stopped by German officers. On the spot they claim they’re walking home from a literary society meeting; their quick thought helps them avoid prison and leads to the formation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. A decade later, English writer Juliet Ashton stumbles across the stories from the society and strikes up a conversation via letters with its members. |
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The Library of Lost and Found | Phaedra Patrick When librarian Martha Storm finds a book of fairy tales left on her doorstep, her calm and predictable life takes an unexpected turn. The book’s dedication was written, surprisingly, by Martha’s grandmother Zelda; other clues suggest that Zelda might not be dead as Martha had believed. |
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The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book | Wendy Welch When Wendy Welch decided to open a used book store in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, she knew that fulfilling this ambition would be difficult given the economy, the proliferation of e-readers, and, of course, Amazon. Rather than just a place to buy books, she created a community resource where readers of all sorts make connections with others in the community and the reading world at large. |
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | Betty Smith Francie Nolan is eleven when the novel opens, living in Brooklyn in a tenement house. Her father is an alcoholic but her mother is a strong woman who makes sure her family is provided for. Francie is a quiet, imaginative child, passionate about learning, reading, and writing, but life doesn’t bring her the things she wants. |
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Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte Having been raised as an unloved orphan in her aunt’s home, Jane Eyre finds her place as a governess in Thornfield Hall. Before long Jane’s life is intertwined with the mysterious characters that make up her new home, from the dark Mr. Rochester to his odd servant Grace Pool. Eventually love and drama intertwine as Jane must attempt to understand the strange happenings of the house and desires of her heart. |
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North and South | Elizabeth Gaskell When Margaret Hale’s father gives up his role as a priest in the Church of England after doubting its leadership, the family leaves the pastoral, southern town of Helstone for the industrialized, northern town of Milton. Here Margaret discovers a sharp contrast to her previous experiences, caused by the poverty and difficult working conditions of the factory laborers. |
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Persuasion | Jane Austen The last novel that Jane Austen wrote is the story of Anne Elliot. At 19, Anne fell in love with a young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth. When she accepted his proposal, however, her wealthy family thought he was beneath her and convinced her to break the engagement. Seven years later, the Elliot family has developed some financial troubles. |
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A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens The second most famous Christmas story ever told. Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly businessman, learns the true meaning of Christmas after he is visited by the ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future. Bah humbug! |
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Dandelion Wine | Ray Bradbury 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding suddenly awakens to the world around him in the summer of 1928 in Green Town, Illinois. His new adolescent awareness takes him on a journey of first discoveries full of magic and exuberance. A joyful read, Ray Bradbury’s first novel is about childlike innocence and living in the present. |
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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe | C. S. Lewis When the Pevensies, four children from England, stumble upon a connection between our world and Narnia, they discover magic, talking animals, friendly satyrs, and a battle between good and evil. |
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The River Between Us | Richard Peck 861 brings changes for young Tilly Pruitt. The nation stands at the brink of war and the only boy in the family, Tilly’s brother Noah, wants to join the fight. That leaves Tilly with her mother and sister struggling to make ends meet. That is, until the elegant Delphine and her dark traveling companion arrive on a steamboat. |
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The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett Mary is a brat. Tragedy followed by banishment to a neglected English estate does nothing to improve her character. It will take an equally unpleasant cousin, a young laborer, and a hidden garden to bring happiness to all. |
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | Betty Smith Francie Nolan is eleven when the novel opens, living in Brooklyn in a tenement house. Her father is an alcoholic but her mother is a strong woman who makes sure her family is provided for. Francie is a quiet, imaginative child, passionate about learning, reading, and writing, but life doesn’t bring her the things she wants. |
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The Watsons go to Birmingham | Christopher Curtis Kenny Watson’s parents are fed up with his older brother Byron, who is running with the wrong crowd and getting in trouble. They pack up Byron, Kenny and little sister Joetta and head to Birmingham, Alabama. Instead of finding the slower pace and quiet lifestyle they had hoped for, the Watsons witness one of the most chilling events of the Civil Rights struggle. |
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The Witch of Blackbird Pond | Elizabeth George Spears When her beloved grandfather dies, Kit Tyler is orphaned, and so must sail from Barbados to the village of Wethersfield in the colony of Connecticut. When she strikes up a friendship with an old woman named Hannah—thought to be a witch—she must confront the society’s narrow moral views. |
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The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton Newland Archer is a man unable to choose between the comfortable and the unknown. Set in New York’s high society at the end of the 1800’s, The Age of Innocence details the lavish lifestyle of an American “Gilded Age” and the emergence of a powerful American aristocracy. |
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The Diaries of Adam and Eve | Mark Twain Mark Twain retells the story of Adam and Eve in a diary format, alternating between Adam’s experiences and Eve’s. By turns hilarious, moving, and heartbreaking, their tale in Twain’s hands becomes something different than its telling in Genesis. |
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Frankenstein | Mary Shelley Victor Frankenstein, compelled to find the meaning of life and of death, creates a living being from the body parts of dead people, but his creation is monstrous to him. |
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The Outsiders | S. E. Hinton The Outsiders is the story of Ponyboy, Soda, Johnny; Cherry, Bob, Marcia—the Greasers and the Socs and their rumbles against each other. Capturing the violence in the contrast of social structures, S.E. Hinton’s novel, written when she was still in high school, explores the way that both groups must come to terms with adult experiences such as fear, loss, and love. |
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Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Hurston The spunky and unforgettable Janie, explains her quest for identity, three marriages (one of which resulted in her being accused of murder), and a journey to her roots. |
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Happiness for Beginners | Katherine Center A year after getting divorced, Helen Carpenter, thirty-two, lets her annoying younger brother talk her into signing up for a wilderness survival course. Thus begins the strangest adventure of Helen's well-behaved life: three weeks in the remotest wilderness of a mountain range in Wyoming where she will survive mosquito infestations, a surprise summer blizzard, a group of sorority girls, and her brother's even-more-annoying best friend. |
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Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone | Benjamin Stevenson Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate. I’m Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I’d killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let’s get started. |
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How to Read a Book | Monica Wood Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher. Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest. Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed. When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways. |
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The Bean Trees | Barbara Kingsolver Taylor Greer leaves Kentucky to begin a new life in the West, never imagining the strange shape this journey will take. Left with a 3-year-old girl by a Cherokee woman in Oklahoma, Greer decides to keep the toddler and make a life together. |
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Remarkably Bright Creatures | Shelby Van Pelt After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors–until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. |
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Leaving Home | Garrison Keillor Lighthearted and full of warmth, Keillor celebrates the common events that fill our lives. The work is a collection of the author’s Prairie Home Companion radio shorts. Although the pieces are set in fictional Lake Woebegone, Minnesota, the stories remind us of our shared human experience. |
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The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion | Fannie Flagg She might be facing an empty nest and her demanding mother’s continuous needs, but southerner Sookie Simmons Poole is doing just fine—until she receives a letter that sets her life in an entirely new direction. |
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The Bookish Life of Nina Hill | Abbi Waxman Nina Hill is comfortable in her life, she spends a lot of time alone, not talking to people. When the father she never knew dies, and leaves something to her in his will; suddenly her solitude is interrupted by sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, and cousins she never knew. |
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The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett | Annie Lyons 85-year-old Eudora Honeysett has had enough of this ridiculous world, she’s just tired of being alone. She decides to reserve a spot at an assisted death clinic in Switzerland, so that she might die on her own terms. But then she meets her new neighbor, 10-year-old Rose, and another neighbor named Stanley. |
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Crossing to Safety | Wallace Stegner When Larry and Sally Morgan, poor Westerners, move to Wisconsin to begin work at Wisconsin University during the Depression, it is the generosity of wealthy Easterner Sid, an established faculty member, and Charity, his headstrong domineering wife, which keeps them afloat. Decades later Charity reunites everyone after tragedy strikes one of the couples. |
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The Distant Hours | Kate Morton In contemporary London, Edie receives a letter that was mailed to her mother nearly fifty years ago and only just arrived. Her normally mellow mother reacts so strongly to the letter—which came from one of the three sisters she lived with in Middlehurst castle in Kent during the Blitz—that Edie decides to investigate. |
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Drenched in Light | Lisa Wingate After her dream of becoming a prima ballerina with the Kansas City ballet crumbles, Julia moves back home to work as a guidance counselor at a prestigious school for performing arts. Her life begins to intertwine with Dell, a scholarship student who is a music virtuoso but struggling to fit in with her wealthy, snooty peers. |
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I’ll Be Your Blue Sky | Marissa de los Santos Clare Hobbes isn’t sure: are her fiancé Zach’s temper flares just a quirk of his personality or something darker? On the weekend of her wedding, a chance encounter with an older woman named Edith helps her to see her troubles clearly, and she decides to call off her wedding. Shortly after, she is surprised to find that Edith had passed away and left her beachfront home in Delaware to Clare. |
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The Language of Flowers | Vanessa Diffenbaugh At 18, Victoria Jones has gathered a bouquet of sorrows. She’s just aged out of the foster care system and, with a string of difficult placements behind her and no one to take care of her, she begins living in a park. Using the knowledge of the Victorian language of flowers—taught to her by the one foster parent —she plants a small garden, bringing her notice, and a chance at a better life. |
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The Library of Lost and Found | Phaedra Patrick When librarian Martha Storm finds a book of fairy tales left on her doorstep, her calm and predictable life takes an unexpected turn. The book’s dedication was written, surprisingly, by Martha’s grandmother Zelda; other clues suggest that Zelda might not be dead as Martha had believed. |
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A Man Called Ove | Fredrik Backman Ove, a widower living in Sweden who’s recently been forced to retire, has had enough: the residents of his neighborhood are constantly breaking the rules and everyone’s annoying. So he decides to end his own life—except his efforts are interrupted by the new neighbors, Parvaneh (who’s fairly pregnant, despite already having two kids) and Patrick (who’s a bumbling idiot who can’t even back up a trailer). |
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The Music Shop | Rachel Joyce In the late 1980s in an English suburb, Frank owns a music shop, where he uses his special skill—knowing what song or album a particular customer needs to hear—to keep the shop open. But only barely, as a developer is attempting to overtake Unity Street and most customers want CDs now, not vinyl. |
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My Real Children | Joe Walton Jo Walton’s novel My Real Children is hard to pin down: part alternate-universe, part family saga, part love story, part travelogue, what it really does is explore the consequences of choice. |
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The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot | Marianne Cronin Lenni is a teenager living with cancer in the long-term care section of a hospital in England. Margot is an older woman living with cancer in another section. They meet each other on the day Lenni witnesses Margot climbing into a garbage can. |
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The Orphan Keeper | Camron Wright Growing up in India, Chellamuthu experiences hunger, poverty, abuse, and quite a bit of theft, but everything changes when he is kidnapped and sold to an orphanage. An American family meets him at the orphanage and decides to adopt him, but it is many months before he can speak enough English to tell them that he actually already has a family. A semester abroad in London, spent living with an Indian family, sparks his need to find his birth family. |
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Peace Like a River | Leif Enger After years of work with Minnesota Public Radio, storyteller Leif Enger weaves together a beautiful expression of love. The novel follows a young family in a heroic trek to find their fugitive brother. Although none of the family finds what they expected, Enger blends faith and hope in a story of family, sacrifice, and religion. The writing is delightful and the story meaningful. |
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The Quilter’s Apprentice | Jennifer Chiaverini The first novel in the Elm Creek Quilts series, this book introduces us to Sarah McClure, who has recently moved to a small town in Pennsylvania with her husband. Sarah strikes up an uneasy relationship with an older woman named Sylvia Compton, who begins teaching her to quilt, an activity that might just turn around both of their lives. |
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Range of Motion | Elizabeth Berg Lainey’s life changes as she tries to cope with caring for her husband, who is in a coma after being struck by a chunk of ice falling from a roof. Lainey never stops believing that her husband, Jay, will wake up, and to encourage him, every day she brings some small item to call him back to his life. Berg has a way of using story to examine the way difficult moments propel us to change, and she does so beautifully in this novel. |
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The Running Dream | Wendelin Van Draanen 16-year-old Jessica Carlisle, is her high school track team’s star 400-meter racer. But when she loses her leg in an accident, her identity seems to be amputated as well. What is life worth to a person who lives to run but only has one leg? She discovers that finding the worth in life is a little bit like running: the spark has to come from her. |
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State of Wonder | Ann Patchett Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder begins with a probable death, that of Dr. Marina Singh’s pharmaceutical co-worker, Anders Eckman, who has disappeared while working in the Amazon jungle. Marina is sent to Brazil herself, tasked with the responsibility of discovering the fate of Anders. |
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Summerlost | Ally Condie A year ago, Cedar’s father and brother Ben were killed by a drunk driver, and to help everyone cope her mom has moved what’s left of her family to the small town of Iron Creek, Utah. Cedar finds a friend, the quirky Leo, who helps her get a job at the town’s Shakespeare Festival, Summerlost. When they’re not working, the two friends discuss the mysterious life of an actress who haunts the sets of the festival’s stage. |
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Tell the Wolves I’m Home | Carol Rifka Brunt Before he dies—of a mysterious illness no one will discuss—June’s Uncle Finn, a famous artist living in New York City, finishes a painting of her and her sister Greta titled “Tell the Wolves I’m Home.” After the funeral, June receives a package from Finn’s friend Toby, the man she heard her mother say murdered him. |
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The Boys of Riverside | Thomas Fuller The incredible story of an all-deaf high school football team's triumphant climb from underdog to undefeated, their inspirational brotherhood, a fascinating portrait of deafness in America, and the indefatigable head coach who spearheaded the team. |
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James | Percival Everett A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. Thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. |
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The Small and the Mighty | Sharon McMahon A heartfelt, inspiring portrait of twelve ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country. Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn't make it into the textbooks. McMahon's cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free. |
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Take My Hand | Dolen Perkins-Valdez Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients. |
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Girl in Translation | Jean Kwok With the promise of housing and a job, Ah-Kim and her mother immigrate to San Francisco from Hong Kong. The housing her Aunt Paula provides is a squalid, unheated apartment and the factory work is demanding and exhausting. It’s not flashy, but her quiet strength, intelligence, and courage as she tries to create an American life for herself and her mother infuse this novel with an uplifting sense of possibility. |
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Guests of the Sheik | Elizabeth Warnock Fernea In 1956, Elizabeth Fernea was a newlywed. Her husband’s field research in anthropology took the couple to a small, rural Iraqi village. In a friendly, intimate tone, Fernea tells the story of her two years there, which she begins as an American woman knowing next to nothing about Iraqi culture, language, or mores, resentful of the abaya she is required to wear; and ends as a close friend to the women of El Nahra. |
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The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe | Gayle Tzmech Lemmon In 1995, Kamili Sidiqi’s dreams of becoming a teacher were disrupted by the Taliban’s descent upon Kabul. A loophole in the new law, however, allowed for women to work out of their home, and so she started a business designing and sewing dresses. |
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Same Kind of Different as Me | Ron Hall Ron, an international art dealer, is wealthy, with a supportive wife and a beautiful home, whereas Denver grew up a modern-day slave in Louisiana before escaping to a life on the streets. They are united by Ron’s wife Debbie who is dying of cancer. Debbie asks Denver to maintain the ministry she began for homeless people in Fort Worth, Texas, and through this work the two men’s disparate lives weave together to form a friendship that redeems them both. |
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The Color of Water | James McBride James McBride wrote this best selling work as a tribute to his mother, a Jewish girl who left her middleclass childhood home in Virginia to live a life of largely inner-city poverty. James celebrates this extraordinary woman’s love and determination while exploring his own identity, racially and culturally. |
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The World’s Strongest Librarian | Josh Hanagarne Josh Hanagrarne first developed the tics of Tourette’s Syndrome when he was six, on stage acting the role of a tree in his first-grade play. The syndrome—which he nicknamed Misty—came to influence almost all of his life. Now a librarian at the downtown Salt Lake City library, Hanagarne mixes his personal narrative with the tales of a metropolitan library, creating a funny, moving memoir that explores faith, books, limitations, family, adaptations, and the lengths we will go to in order to save ourselves. |
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down | Anne Fadiman In the small community of Merced, California, reside thousands of Hmong refugees from the highlands of Laos; among them is the Lee family, whose youngest daughter Lia suffers from severe epilepsy. Anne Fadiman attempts to shed light on Hmong culture and understand the seemingly irreconcilable differences between western medicine and the Hmong in this poignant narrative. |
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The Orphan Keeper | Camron Wright Growing up in India, Chellamuthu experiences hunger, poverty, abuse, and quite a bit of theft, but everything changes when he is kidnapped and sold to an orphanage. An American family meets him at the orphanage and decides to adopt him, but it is many months before he can speak enough English to tell them that he actually already has a family. A semester abroad in London, spent living with an Indian family, sparks his need to find his birth family. |
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The Bonesetter’s Daughter | Amy Tan In this powerful story of courage, hardships, surviving and healing, a Chinese-born mother and her America-born daughter explore their past. Although tragedy has marred their lives, Tan explores three generations of women who, despite vastly different circumstances, are tied by the common bonds of heritage. |
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I Heard the Owl Call My Name | Margaret Craven I Heard the Owl Call My Name is the simple yet powerful story of a young vicar sent to live with the Kwakiutl tribe in the Pacific Northwest. Unaware of his own impending death, he finds that the tribe’s ways are being eroded by an encroaching American culture. |
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Almost Famous Women | Megan Mayhew Bergman The women in this collection of short stories are almost famous either because of their proximity to fame—Lord Byron’s abandoned daughter, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s outgoing sister Norma, Oscar Wilde’s vivacious niece—or because their grand ambitions were only barely noticed by most of the world—dancing in Paris, driving a motorcycle at daring speeds and angles, forming America’s first integrated all-girl swing band. |
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The Help | Kathryn Stockett Skeeter, a white socialite; has recently graduated from Ole Miss and wants to write a book about the experiences black maids have raising white children and taking care of white people’s homes. The maids in the community initially resist Skeeter’s idea, but when a tragedy befalls one of their friends, thirteen of them take the risk to tell of the hardship of their positions. |
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Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Hurston The spunky and unforgettable Janie, explains her quest for identity, three marriages (one of which resulted in her being accused of murder), and a journey to her roots. |
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The Watsons go to Birmingham | Christopher Curtis Kenny Watson’s parents are fed up with his older brother Byron, who is running with the wrong crowd and getting in trouble. They pack up Byron, Kenny and little sister Joetta and head to Birmingham, Alabama. Instead of finding the slower pace and quiet lifestyle they had hoped for, the Watsons witness one of the most chilling events of the Civil Rights struggle. |
Gentle books are those that do not contain sex, swearing, or excessive violence.
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Addie | Mary Lee Settle Born in West Virginia, Addie ends up in Kentucky, and her life encompasses some of the themes of America itself: the Civil War, the pioneers’ move west, and, above all, family. Settle’s account is a reminder that the past always shapes the future, and that family is always at the beginning of our story. |
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After the Dancing Days | Margaret Rostkowski Young Annie learns about the horrors of World War I through the suffering and stories of wounded soldiers recovering in a veterans’ hospital near her small Kansas hometown. |
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The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion | Fannie Flagg She might be facing an empty nest and her demanding mother’s continuous needs, but southerner Sookie Simmons Poole is doing just fine—until she receives a letter that sets her life in an entirely new direction. |
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All the Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr This haunting novel tells the story of Marie, a blind girl growing up in France as World War II begins, and Werner, an orphan growing up in Germany during the same time. Werner’s natural instinct for science is discovered by a Nazi official who arranges for him to be sent to the school at Schulpforta, while Marie moves to St. Malo, after the invasion of Paris. |
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Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner When wheelchair bound historian Lyman Ward decides to chronicle the lives of his extraordinary grandparents and their struggles in the Western frontier, their story takes him from boom towns in Colorado, to near starvation on the banks of an Idaho river, to near-peace in California. |
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The Ballad of Frankie Silver | Sharyn McCrumb The Appalachian wilderness comes to life in this novel that explores the mystery of what happened to Frankie Silver, hanged for murder in a small North Carolina town in 1833. In contemporary Tennessee, Sherriff Spencer Arrowood investigates a different murder, perhaps committed by a young woman who grew up poor in the mountains, Fate Harkryder. The two murders—and the two young women moving through a legal system that fails them—begin to weave together as Spencer works to uncover the truth. |
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The Blue Castle | L. M. Montgomery When 29-year-old Valancy Stirling (the plain, quite spinster of her family) receives the surprising news that she has a fatal heart condition, she decides to entirely change whatever life she has left to live. Rather than quietly obeying the conscriptions and directions of her family, she starts making her own choices, including making friends with the town drunk and a vagabond. |
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The Butterfly and the Violin | Kristy Cambron Jilted by her fiancé, Manhattan art dealer Sera James retreats into her work until the memory of a painting pushes her out of her comfort zone. In German-controlled Poland, violinist Adele von Bron is sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau after she is caught trying to rescue Jews. There she is forced to play her violin during the death marches of the Jewish prisoners. The two stories intertwine into a moving tale of faith, loss, art, and courage. |
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The Bean Trees | Barbara Kingsolver Taylor Greer leaves Kentucky to begin a new life in the West, never imagining the strange shape this journey will take. Left with a 3-year-old girl by a Cherokee woman in Oklahoma, Greer decides to keep the toddler and make a life together. |
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Bellfield Hall, or, the Observations of Miss Dido Kent | Anna Dean Dido Kent, at 35 years old, is considered to be a hopeless spinster—but solving mysteries gives her life a sense of purpose. Dido’s niece Catherine is heartbroken, as her fiancé has abruptly called off the engagement. He vanishes, and then a murdered woman is found on the grounds of Bellfield Hall, and Dido must figure out if the two are connected. |
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The Boys in the Boat | Daniel James Brown The Boys in the Boat tells the true story of nine working-class boys who came from the University of Washington to the 1936 Berlin Olympics—and beat the German team for the gold. |
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Clock Dance | Anne Tyler Clock Dance begins in 1967, when 11-year-old Willa Drake is trying to figure out her mother’s absence; picks up in 1977 as she starts college, jumps to 1997 when she is a young widow and then to 2017, when her sons are off living their own lives and all she wants is to become a grandmother. Then a phone call from a near-stranger changes the trajectory of her life again, sending her to Baltimore to care for the daughter of a person she barely knows. |
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Dancing at the Rascal Fair | Ivan Doig With his friend Rob Barclay, Angus leaves Scotland for Montana, where the two friends become sheep ranchers, as well as fathers, husbands, and men along the way. |
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Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat | Vicky Myron One cold morning in Iowa, librarian Vicki Myron came into work and found a tiny kitten had been stuffed through the book-return drop. Rescued by the librarians of the Spencer Public Library, Dewey became the library cat. This memoir details his twenty years at the library, including his influence on both the librarians and the library patrons. |
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Drenched in Light | Lisa Wingate After her dream of becoming a prima ballerina with the Kansas City ballet crumbles, Julia moves back home to work as a guidance counselor at a prestigious school for performing arts. Her life begins to intertwine with Dell, a scholarship student who is a music virtuoso but struggling to fit in with her wealthy, snooty peers. |
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Edenbrooke | Julianne Donaldson When Marianne receives an invitation to spend the summer with her twin sister in Edenbrooke, she has no idea of the romance and adventure that await her once she meets the dashing Sir Philip.
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Ella Minnow Pea | Mark Dunn Ella lives on the tiny island called Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, a “nation of letter writers” named after Nevin Nollop, who wrote the sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.) All is peaceful and happy on Nollop, until letters begin falling off the statue of Nevin Nollop. |
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A Fine and Pleasant Misery | Patrick F. McManus “The more you talked about the miseries of life in the woods,” writes Patrick McManus, “the more you wanted to get back out there and start suffering again. Camping was a fine and pleasant misery.” If you’ve ever pitched a tent or hit the trail, McManus’s writing will make you laugh in recognition of the miserable joys of the great outdoors. |
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Good-Bye, Mr. Chips | James Hilton Charles Chipping is a terrible teacher – uninspiring and unloved by his students at the (somewhat) prestigious Brookfield School for Boys in England. But everything changes when he meets and marries the lovely and intelligent Katherine on a summer vacation. With some of his shyness finally overcome, Chips discovers a way to begin connecting with the young men in his classes, helping them to uncover the beauty of language and history. |
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Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society | Mary Ann Shaffer On the tiny Channel island of Guernsey, an impromptu literary society is formed when four friends are stopped by German officers. On the spot they claim they’re walking home from a literary society meeting; their quick thought helps them avoid prison and leads to the formation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. A decade later, English writer Juliet Ashton stumbles across the stories from the society and strikes up a conversation via letters with its members. |
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The Goose Girl | Shannon Hale Princess Anidori is born with a word on her tongue, which means as she grows she learns, under her aunt’s encouragement, how to speak to animals. This strangeness does not sit well with the queen, so when the king dies, Princess Ani’s mother forges a marriage between her and the prince of Bayern, a neighboring country. But Ani’s betrayal by trusted people is just beginning; on her way to Bayern her friend Selia plots to kill Ani and take her place. |
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Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte Having been raised as an unloved orphan in her aunt’s home, Jane Eyre finds her place as a governess in Thornfield Hall. Before long Jane’s life is intertwined with the mysterious characters that make up her new home, from the dark Mr. Rochester to his odd servant Grace Pool. Eventually love and drama intertwine as Jane must attempt to understand the strange happenings of the house and desires of her heart. |
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Letters of a Woman Homesteader | Elinore Stewart After deciding that city life as a laundress wasn’t for her, Elinore Pruitt, a young widowed mother, accepts an offer to assist with a ranch in Wyoming, work that she finds exceedingly more rewarding. |
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Light of the Candle | Carol Pratt Bradley Most everyone knows the bible story of Daniel in the lion’s den: captured and taken away to Babylon, he remained true to the religion he learned in Jerusalem by praying three times a day. In Light of the Candle, Utah author Carol Pratt Bradley brings ancient Jerusalem and Babylon to life with the stories of Daniel’s experiences. |
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat | Oliver Sacks An 88-year-old woman, somewhat deaf, awakens one night to the sound of music from her childhood playing loudly. The songs don’t come from any radio but play loudly and repeatedly in her head. Her ENT and psychiatrist can’t find anything wrong, but her neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks, eventually figures out what’s causing the music: a small stroke in the woman’s temporal lobe. That’s just one of the stories Dr. Sacks writes about in this collection of neurological case studies. |
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The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post | Allison Pataki A child of the modest farmlands of the Midwest, Marjorie was inspired by a few simple rules: Always think for yourself, never take success for granted, and work hard--even when you're American royalty, even when you're dripping in imperial diamonds. From crawling through Moscow warehouses to rescue a tsar's treasures to outrunning the Nazis in London, from serving the homeless of the Great Depression to entertaining Kennedys, Roosevelts, and Hollywood's biggest stars, Marjorie lived an epic life few could imagine.
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Maisie Dobbs | Jacqueline Winspear Maisie Dobbs, the new maid at the London home of the suffragette Lady Rowan Compton, is not an average maid. She’s only thirteen, and she can read, and she sneaks into the manor’s library to study European philosophy. When Lady Compton discovers Maisie’s precocious intellect, she becomes her patron, eventually sending her off to college, but the Great War interrupts Maisie’s education. She volunteers as a nurse and then, when the war ends, decides to become a private detective. |
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Meet Me at the Museum | Anne Youngson At the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark lies the Tollund Man: a body pulled from a peat bog, placed there roughly 2300 years ago. Tina Hopgood, who lives on an isolated farm in England, has been fascinated with this mummified corpse since she was a young adult, away from home at University, but has never gone to see it. One day, Professor Anders Larsen receives a letter from Tina starting a correspondence which blooms into a friendship. |
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Moon Over Manifest | Clare Vanderpool Abilene Tucker's father, Gideon, has sent her back to live in Manifest for the summer, thinking she’ll be safer there than living a drifter lifestyle with him. While there she discovers the decades-old mystery of The Rattler along with new friends and a boxful of old objects that lead her to Gideon’s history. |
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Mr. Dickens and His Carol | Samantha Silva Immerse yourself in Victorian England in this atmospheric imagining of Charles Dickens’s experience writing A Christmas Carol. In November 1943, Dickens finds himself in a bit of a financial crisis. His wife has just had their sixth child, the holidays are almost upon him, and his serialized novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, is not selling well. To keep his publishing contract, he must write a Christmas story, even though the idea is not especially appealing. |
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Mrs. Mike | Benedict Freedman Mrs. Mike is the true story of Katherine Mary O’Fallon, a young Irish girl from Boston, who marries Canadian Mountie Sergeant Mike Flannigan, who is priest, doctor and magistrate to all in the wilderness of the North Woods of Canada. Extremely popular, the novel has won the hearts of millions for its depiction of young love’s journey to maturity. |
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North and South | Elizabeth Gaskell When Margaret Hale’s father gives up his role as a priest in the Church of England after doubting its leadership, the family leaves the pastoral, southern town of Helstone for the industrialized, northern town of Milton. Here Margaret discovers a sharp contrast to her previous experiences, caused by the poverty and difficult working conditions of the factory laborers. |
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Once Upon a Town | Bob Greene They began almost immediately, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor: the people of a tiny town in Nebraska started feeding the soldiers who came through North Platte by the trainful. Chicago Times columnist Bob Greene explores this little-known story from World War II, showing how the kindness of strangers changed lives. |
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The Orphan Keeper | Camron Wright Growing up in India, Chellamuthu experiences hunger, poverty, abuse, and quite a bit of theft, but everything changes when he is kidnapped and sold to an orphanage. An American family meets him at the orphanage and decides to adopt him, but it is many months before he can speak enough English to tell them that he actually already has a family. A semester abroad in London, spent living with an Indian family, sparks his need to find his birth family. |
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The Persian Pickle Club | Sandra Dallas In Depression-era Harveyville, Kansas, a group of women form the Persian Pickle Club, erstwhile quilting group turned sisterhood. The newest “Pickle,” Rita, has just moved to Kansas from Denver, and she’s a little bit different from the rest of the group. She’s a big-city girl who doesn’t know the details of living a farm life, let alone quilting, but Queenie Bean, the group’s youngest member and the novel’s narrator, strikes up a friendship with her anyway. |
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Persuasion | Jane Austen The last novel that Jane Austen wrote is the story of Anne Elliot. At 19, Anne fell in love with a young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth. When she accepted his proposal, however, her wealthy family thought he was beneath her and convinced her to break the engagement. Seven years later, the Elliot family has developed some financial troubles. |
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The Quilter’s Apprentice | Jennifer Chiaverini The first novel in the Elm Creek Quilts series, this book introduces us to Sarah McClure, who has recently moved to a small town in Pennsylvania with her husband. Sarah strikes up an uneasy relationship with an older woman named Sylvia Compton, who begins teaching her to quilt, an activity that might just turn around both of their lives. |
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Range of Motion | Elizabeth Berg Lainey’s life changes as she tries to cope with caring for her husband, who is in a coma after being struck by a chunk of ice falling from a roof. Lainey never stops believing that her husband, Jay, will wake up, and to encourage him, every day she brings some small item to call him back to his life. Berg has a way of using story to examine the way difficult moments propel us to change, and she does so beautifully in this novel. |
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Rebecca | Daphne Du Maurier When she arrives at Manderley, the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter discovers not all is as expected. Her husband’s first wife, the seemingly-brilliant, talented, and beautiful Rebecca, haunts both the house itself and its occupants. Attempting to establish her marriage and her place within the house, Mrs. de Winter is challenged at every turn by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. |
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Remarkably Bright Creatures | Shelby Van Pelt After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors–until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova. |
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The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place | Julie Berry The seven students at St. Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies have formed a pleasant little sisterhood away from their horrible families. But when the school’s headmistress and her brother die during their Sunday meal, their situation is threated. So they do what any clever girls would do: hide the bodies and carry on. |
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A Sparrow in Terezin | Kristy Cambron Two women, one in the present day and one in 1942, each hope for a brighter future. But they’ll both have to battle through their darkest days to reach it. |
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Summerlost | Ally Condie A year ago, Cedar’s father and brother Ben were killed by a drunk driver, and to help everyone cope her mom has moved what’s left of her family to the small town of Iron Creek, Utah. Cedar finds a friend, the quirky Leo, who helps her get a job at the town’s Shakespeare Festival, Summerlost. When they’re not working, the two friends discuss the mysterious life of an actress who haunts the sets of the festival’s stage. |
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The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle | Jennifer Ryan After losing everything in the London Blitz, renowned fashion designer Cressida Westcott heads to the country where she inspires a local village sewing group to mend wedding dresses for both local brides and brides across the county, helping others celebrate love while searching for it themselves. |
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The Wright Brothers | David McCullough Mankind’s historic first flight, accomplished at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina by the Wright brothers, is a well-known tale. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer David McCullough develops the details of the story that are not as widely known, especially the help of Wilber and Orville Wright’s sister, Katharine, whose assistance had a far-larger role that most people know. |
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Miss Benson’s Beetle | Rachel Joyce It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson–a sensible schoolmarm and lonely spinster–is just trying to get through life. But one day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and her tidy, circumscribed life, to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia. |
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The Orphan Keeper | Camron Wright Growing up in India, Chellamuthu experiences hunger, poverty, abuse, and quite a bit of theft, but everything changes when he is kidnapped and sold to an orphanage. An American family meets him at the orphanage and decides to adopt him, but it is many months before he can speak enough English to tell them that he actually already has a family. A semester abroad in London, spent living with an Indian family, sparks his need to find his birth family. |
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Burial Rites | Hannah Kent Agnes Magnusdottir, a young working woman, has been charged with the murder of her employer. While she awaits the time of her execution, she is sent to live at a farm owned by a family in northern Iceland. She chooses a young priest there, Father Tovi, to tell her story to. |
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The Fountains of Silence | Ruta Sepetys Daniel, an 18-year-old American who is in Madrid with his parents, is trying to capture the city through his camera lens. Ana is a young woman working at the Castellana Hilton whose parents were executed for their anti-Fascist politics. Her brother Rafa, who promotes the bullfights. Their cousin Puri, who works in an orphanage. In 1957, the lives of these four young adults intertwine in the Spanish city, ruled by Franco’s politics and made dark by secrets. |
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The Housekeeper and the Professor | Yoko Ogawa He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem — ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. |
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A Man Called Ove | Fredrik Backman Ove, a widower living in Sweden who’s recently been forced to retire, has had enough: the residents of his neighborhood are constantly breaking the rules and everyone’s annoying. So he decides to end his own life—except his efforts are interrupted by the new neighbors, Parvaneh (who’s fairly pregnant, despite already having two kids) and Patrick (who’s a bumbling idiot who can’t even back up a trailer). |
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A Brilliant Night of Stars and Ice | Rebecca Connolly Based on the remarkable true story of the Carpathia--the only ship and her legendary captain who answered the distress call of the sinking Titanic. Rostron's heroic and compassionate leadership, his methodical preparations for rescue, and his grit and determination to act honorably and selflessly to save lives and care for the survivors, sets the course for this awe-inspiring story. |
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The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post | Allison Pataki A child of the modest farmlands of the Midwest, Marjorie was inspired by a few simple rules: Always think for yourself, never take success for granted, and work hard--even when you're American royalty, even when you're dripping in imperial diamonds. From crawling through Moscow warehouses to rescue a tsar's treasures to outrunning the Nazis in London, from serving the homeless of the Great Depression to entertaining Kennedys, Roosevelts, and Hollywood's biggest stars, Marjorie lived an epic life few could imagine.
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James | Percival Everett A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. Thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. |
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The Frozen River | Ariel Lawhon As a midwife and healer, Martha Ballard is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Her diary soon lands at the center of scandal, compelling Martha to decide where her loyalties lie. |
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Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. |
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The Warm Hands of Ghosts | Katherine Arden Home in Halifax Laura Iven receives word of her brother's death in combat, along with his personal effects–but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about haunted trenches, and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something–or someone–else? |
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The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle | Jennifer Ryan After losing everything in the London Blitz, renowned fashion designer Cressida Westcott heads to the country where she inspires a local village sewing group to mend wedding dresses for both local brides and brides across the county, helping others celebrate love while searching for it themselves. |
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The Butterfly and the Violin | Kristy Cambron Jilted by her fiancé, Manhattan art dealer Sera James retreats into her work until the memory of a painting pushes her out of her comfort zone. In German-controlled Poland, violinist Adele von Bron is sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau after she is caught trying to rescue Jews. There she is forced to play her violin during the death marches of the Jewish prisoners. The two stories intertwine into a moving tale of faith, loss, art, and courage. |
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Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society | Mary Ann Shaffer On the tiny Channel island of Guernsey, an impromptu literary society is formed when four friends are stopped by German officers. On the spot they claim they’re walking home from a literary society meeting; their quick thought helps them avoid prison and leads to the formation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. A decade later, English writer Juliet Ashton stumbles across the stories from the society and strikes up a conversation via letters with its members. |
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Letters of a Woman Homesteader | Elinore Stewart After deciding that city life as a laundress wasn’t for her, Elinore Pruitt, a young widowed mother, accepts an offer to assist with a ranch in Wyoming, work that she finds exceedingly more rewarding. |
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Light of the Candle | Carol Pratt Bradley Most everyone knows the bible story of Daniel in the lion’s den: captured and taken away to Babylon, he remained true to the religion he learned in Jerusalem by praying three times a day. In Light of the Candle, Utah author Carol Pratt Bradley brings ancient Jerusalem and Babylon to life with the stories of Daniel’s experiences. |
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Mr. Dickens and His Carol | Samantha Silva Immerse yourself in Victorian England in this atmospheric imagining of Charles Dickens’s experience writing A Christmas Carol. In November 1943, Dickens finds himself in a bit of a financial crisis. His wife has just had their sixth child, the holidays are almost upon him, and his serialized novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, is not selling well. To keep his publishing contract, he must write a Christmas story, even though the idea is not especially appealing. |
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Mrs. Mike | Benedict Freedman Mrs. Mike is the true story of Katherine Mary O’Fallon, a young Irish girl from Boston, who marries Canadian Mountie Sergeant Mike Flannigan, who is priest, doctor and magistrate to all in the wilderness of the North Woods of Canada. Extremely popular, the novel has won the hearts of millions for its depiction of young love’s journey to maturity. |
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Once Upon a Town | Bob Greene They began almost immediately, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor: the people of a tiny town in Nebraska started feeding the soldiers who came through North Platte by the trainful. Chicago Times columnist Bob Greene explores this little-known story from World War II, showing how the kindness of strangers changed lives. |
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The Wright Brothers | David McCullough Mankind’s historic first flight, accomplished at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina by the Wright brothers, is a well-known tale. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer David McCullough develops the details of the story that are not as widely known, especially the help of Wilber and Orville Wright’s sister, Katharine, whose assistance had a far-larger role that most people know. |
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All the Light We Cannot See | Anthony Doerr This haunting novel tells the story of Marie, a blind girl growing up in France as World War II begins, and Werner, an orphan growing up in Germany during the same time. Werner’s natural instinct for science is discovered by a Nazi official who arranges for him to be sent to the school at Schulpforta, while Marie moves to St. Malo, after the invasion of Paris. |
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After the Dancing Days | Margaret Rostkowski Young Annie learns about the horrors of World War I through the suffering and stories of wounded soldiers recovering in a veterans’ hospital near her small Kansas hometown. |
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The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion | Fannie Flagg She might be facing an empty nest and her demanding mother’s continuous needs, but southerner Sookie Simmons Poole is doing just fine—until she receives a letter that sets her life in an entirely new direction. |
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Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner When wheelchair bound historian Lyman Ward decides to chronicle the lives of his extraordinary grandparents and their struggles in the Western frontier, their story takes him from boom towns in Colorado, to near starvation on the banks of an Idaho river, to near-peace in California. |
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As Bright as Heaven | Susan Meissner After the death of their son Henry, the Bright family moves to Philadelphia. Sisters Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa adjust to life in the city, but then the Spanish flu sweeps through, changing their lives in ways they never imagined. |
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The Ballad of Frankie Silver | Sharyn McCrumb The Appalachian wilderness comes to life in this novel that explores the mystery of what happened to Frankie Silver, hanged for murder in a small North Carolina town in 1833. In contemporary Tennessee, Sherriff Spencer Arrowood investigates a different murder, perhaps committed by a young woman who grew up poor in the mountains, Fate Harkryder. The two murders—and the two young women moving through a legal system that fails them—begin to weave together as Spencer works to uncover the truth. |
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Dancing at the Rascal Fair | Ivan Doig With his friend Rob Barclay, Angus leaves Scotland for Montana, where the two friends become sheep ranchers, as well as fathers, husbands, and men along the way. |
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The Book Thief | Markus Zusak The Book Thief rotates around an unlikely pair: the narrator—death—and the young Liesel Meminger, whose father has disappeared for being a communist and whose mother soon vanishes. On the way to a foster home in Musling, Germany, her younger brother dies, and at the small grave side service, she steals a book from one of the grave diggers about how to dig graves. |
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Burial Rites | Hannah Kent Agnes Magnusdottir, a young working woman, has been charged with the murder of her employer. While she awaits the time of her execution, she is sent to live at a farm owned by a family in northern Iceland. She chooses a young priest there, Father Tovi, to tell her story to. |
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Caroline: Little House Revisited | Sarah Miller Charles, Caroline, Mary, and Laura Ingalls pack their wagon and set out on a cold day in February, leaving their home in the Big Woods of Wisconsin to settle a farmstead in Indian Territory. It’s a story familiar to anyone who read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, but here we read it through a different perspective, that of Caroline. |
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The Distant Hours | Kate Morton In contemporary London, Edie receives a letter that was mailed to her mother nearly fifty years ago and only just arrived. Her normally mellow mother reacts so strongly to the letter—which came from one of the three sisters she lived with in Middlehurst castle in Kent during the Blitz—that Edie decides to investigate. |
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Ella Minnow Pea | Mark Dunn Ella lives on the tiny island called Nollop, off the coast of South Carolina, a “nation of letter writers” named after Nevin Nollop, who wrote the sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.) All is peaceful and happy on Nollop, until letters begin falling off the statue of Nevin Nollop. |
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The Fountains of Silence | Ruta Sepetys Daniel, an 18-year-old American who is in Madrid with his parents, is trying to capture the city through his camera lens. Ana is a young woman working at the Castellana Hilton whose parents were executed for their anti-Fascist politics. Her brother Rafa, who promotes the bullfights. Their cousin Puri, who works in an orphanage. In 1957, the lives of these four young adults intertwine in the Spanish city, ruled by Franco’s politics and made dark by secrets. |
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The Help | Kathryn Stockett Skeeter, a white socialite; has recently graduated from Ole Miss and wants to write a book about the experiences black maids have raising white children and taking care of white people’s homes. The maids in the community initially resist Skeeter’s idea, but when a tragedy befalls one of their friends, thirteen of them take the risk to tell of the hardship of their positions. |
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The Kitchen House | Kathleen Grissom Young Lavinia’s parents die while the family is crossing the ocean to America, and the ship’s captain takes her as a servant at his plantation to pay for her passage across the Atlantic. She is assigned to the kitchen house, where she is taught to work by Belle, a slave who is also the captain’s daughter. Lavinia forms a close relationship with the slaves she works alongside, but as she grows older her life’s possibilities and the untenable conditions of slavery begin to fracture the bonds. |
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The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club | Helen Simonson It is the summer of 1919 and Constance Haverhill has been asked to give up her cottage and her job at the estate she helped run during the war now that the men are back. She’s sent as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a seaside hotel. Constance is swept up in the social whirl of Hazelbourne-on-Sea, but things are more complicated than they seem in this sunny pocket of English high society. |
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The Invention of Wings | Sue Monk Kidd Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké were two of the earliest abolitionists and suffragettes in America, fighting for equal rights in the 1830’s so vocally that they were eventually exiled from their Charleston, South Carolina home. |
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Light of the Candle | Carol Pratt Bradley Most everyone knows the bible story of Daniel in the lion’s den: captured and taken away to Babylon, he remained true to the religion he learned in Jerusalem by praying three times a day. In Light of the Candle, Utah author Carol Pratt Bradley brings ancient Jerusalem and Babylon to life with the stories of Daniel’s experiences. |
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The Lost Letter | Jillian Cantor Kristoff, an 18-year-old German, starts his apprenticeship as an engraver, learning how to create stamps and documents from the Jewish Frederick Faber and forming a relationship with his daughter, Elena. Katie Nelson is working through a divorce while simultaneously helping her father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. When she discovers an unopened letter with an unusual stamp mixed in with his stamp collection, she begins a journey that will reveal her history and lead her to a new beginning. |
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Maisie Dobbs | Jacqueline Winspear Maisie Dobbs, the new maid at the London home of the suffragette Lady Rowan Compton, is not an average maid. She’s only thirteen, and she can read, and she sneaks into the manor’s library to study European philosophy. When Lady Compton discovers Maisie’s precocious intellect, she becomes her patron, eventually sending her off to college, but the Great War interrupts Maisie’s education. She volunteers as a nurse and then, when the war ends, decides to become a private detective. |
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Miss Benson’s Beetle | Rachel Joyce It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson–a sensible schoolmarm and lonely spinster–is just trying to get through life. But one day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and her tidy, circumscribed life, to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia. |
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Moon Over Manifest | Clare Vanderpool Abilene Tucker's father, Gideon, has sent her back to live in Manifest for the summer, thinking she’ll be safer there than living a drifter lifestyle with him. While there she discovers the decades-old mystery of The Rattler along with new friends and a boxful of old objects that lead her to Gideon’s history. |
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The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot | Marianne Cronin Lenni is a teenager living with cancer in the long-term care section of a hospital in England. Margot is an older woman living with cancer in another section. They meet each other on the day Lenni witnesses Margot climbing into a garbage can. |
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Oral History | Lee Smith Lee Smith captures the wandering thread of personal story in this narrative about an Appalachian family cursed by a witch woman, starting in 1902 and weaving through the century to the contemporary Jennifer Cantrell, who delves into her dead mother’s family history for her thesis. |
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The Persian Pickle Club | Sandra Dallas In Depression-era Harveyville, Kansas, a group of women form the Persian Pickle Club, erstwhile quilting group turned sisterhood. The newest “Pickle,” Rita, has just moved to Kansas from Denver, and she’s a little bit different from the rest of the group. She’s a big-city girl who doesn’t know the details of living a farm life, let alone quilting, but Queenie Bean, the group’s youngest member and the novel’s narrator, strikes up a friendship with her anyway. |
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A Piece of the World | Christina Baker Kline Andrew Wyeth’s iconic American painting, “Christina’s World,” catches a simple scene in oil paint: a looming house, a field of waving, golden grain, and a woman in a pink dress, a scene that evokes an uncertain emotion as it creates a strong sense of place. Christina Baker Kline’s novel A Piece of the World imagines the story behind and beyond the painting, also creating an evocative sense of a place in a time within the life of Christina Olsen, the woman in the pink dress. |
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The River Between Us | Richard Peck 861 brings changes for young Tilly Pruitt. The nation stands at the brink of war and the only boy in the family, Tilly’s brother Noah, wants to join the fight. That leaves Tilly with her mother and sister struggling to make ends meet. That is, until the elegant Delphine and her dark traveling companion arrive on a steamboat. |
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Saving CeeCee Honeycutt | Beth Hoffman When her mother Camille—former Onion Queen of 1951—is killed, CeeCee Honeycutt is just about on her own. After all, her father isn’t about to step in and take care of her. Luckily, CeeCee’s long-lost great-aunt Tootie shows up in Ohio just hours after the funeral. She whisks her great-niece off to live with her and her maid Oletta in Savannah. |
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The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place | Julie Berry The seven students at St. Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies have formed a pleasant little sisterhood away from their horrible families. But when the school’s headmistress and her brother die during their Sunday meal, their situation is threated. So they do what any clever girls would do: hide the bodies and carry on. |
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The Snow Child | Eowyn Ivey It is the story of Jack and Mabel, who’ve left their fairly safe but exceedingly sad life in 1920’s Pennsylvania for the Alaskan frontier. Sad because, except for one stillborn, they never were able to have children, and all of the family reminders around them (the nieces and nephews, the new babies, the excited couples marrying) were just too much. |
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A Sparrow in Terezin | Kristy Cambron Two women, one in the present day and one in 1942, each hope for a brighter future. But they’ll both have to battle through their darkest days to reach it. |
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The Witch of Blackbird Pond | Elizabeth George Spears When her beloved grandfather dies, Kit Tyler is orphaned, and so must sail from Barbados to the village of Wethersfield in the colony of Connecticut. When she strikes up a friendship with an old woman named Hannah—thought to be a witch—she must confront the society’s narrow moral views. |
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My Antonia | Willa Cather Narrator Jim Burden tells the story beginning when, as a small boy, he left his life in civilized Virginia and traveled to the edge of the Nebraska frontier. Jim remembers his childhood friend, the vivacious and spirited Antonia, an immigrant child from Bohemia, and how their own lives, families, and friends were shaped by the beauty and cruelty of the Great Plains. |
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These is My Words | Nancy Turner Written as a diary, this novel is Sarah’s story. At 18, in 1881, she leaves her home in New Mexico to begin a new life on the Arizona frontier. Her journal starts out rough—full of misspellings and awkward sentences—but (with the assistance of a pile of books she discovers) becomes smooth, confident, and powerful, illustrating how her experiences change her. |
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True Grit | Charles Portis “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood,” begins the novel True Grit; incredible, perhaps, but fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross did just that. When her father is shot down in Fort Smith, Arkansas—his horse and his $150 bank roll stolen as well—she heads out into Indian Territory in the company of the meanest U.S. Ranger she can find, Rooster Cogburn. |
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March: A Novel | Geraldine Brooks Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women is re-imagined in this novel by Brooks. Based loosely on Alcott’s real father, March is a minister influenced by Emerson and Thoreau (both family friends) and struggles to maintain his faith and idealism in the face of racism and mercenary behavior from both sides of the civil war. |
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The Women | Kristin Hannah Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation. She has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965 when her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. |
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1776 | David McCullough In this masterful book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence - when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper. |
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The Anthropocene Reviewed | John Green The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays adapted and expanded from his groundbreaking podcast, John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. |
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The Anxious Generation | Jonathan Haidt An investigation into the collapse of youth mental health--and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood. After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time, investigates the nature of childhood, and issues a clear call to action to protect our children--and ourselves--from the psychological damage of a phone-based life. |
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The Bookshop | Evan Friss An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations. |
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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind | William Kamkwamba Just a teenager, Kamkwamba turned to his small local library for education where he learned about windmills and decided to build one. Scrapped together with pieces of bicycles, tractor parts, and scrap metal, the windmill brought to his family what only 2% of Malawians have: electricity and running water. |
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The Boys in the Boat | Daniel James Brown The Boys in the Boat tells the true story of nine working-class boys who came from the University of Washington to the 1936 Berlin Olympics—and beat the German team for the gold. |
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The Boys of Riverside | Thomas Fuller The incredible story of an all-deaf high school football team's triumphant climb from underdog to undefeated, their inspirational brotherhood, a fascinating portrait of deafness in America, and the indefatigable head coach who spearheaded the team. |
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Braiding Sweetgrass | Robin Wall Kimmerer In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin brings the two lenses of botany and a Potawatomi woman together to reveal what it means to see humans as “the younger brothers of creation.” As she explores these themes, she circles toward a central argument: the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the world. |
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Call the Midwife | Jennifer Worth In the 1950’s, Jennifer Worth left her comfortable, middle-class life to work in London’s East End as a midwife. She gathers the stories of her experiences in this remarkable memoir. |
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A Christmas Memory | Truman Capote Filled with memories from his childhood in Alabama, this memoir from Truman Capote pays tribute to his distant cousin Miss Sook Faulk, his old-maid cousin with whom he formed a special bond; making fruitcake, cutting their own tree, and celebrating a tipsy yuletide (from the leftover moonshine-soaked fruitcake). |
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Mrs. Mike | Benedict Freedman Mrs. Mike is the true story of Katherine Mary O’Fallon, a young Irish girl from Boston, who marries Canadian Mountie Sergeant Mike Flannigan, who is priest, doctor and magistrate to all in the wilderness of the North Woods of Canada. Extremely popular, the novel has won the hearts of millions for its depiction of young love’s journey to maturity. |
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The Day the World Came to Town | Jim DeFede After thirty-eight jetliners were rerouted to Newfoundland on September 11, 2001 because the United States’ airspace was closing, the townspeople of Gander came to the aid of six thousand travelers, offering food, lodging, and other comforts. |
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Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat | Vicky Myron One cold morning in Iowa, librarian Vicki Myron came into work and found a tiny kitten had been stuffed through the book-return drop. Rescued by the librarians of the Spencer Public Library, Dewey became the library cat. This memoir details his twenty years at the library, including his influence on both the librarians and the library patrons. |
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The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe | Gayle Tzmech Lemmon In 1995, Kamili Sidiqi’s dreams of becoming a teacher were disrupted by the Taliban’s descent upon Kabul. A loophole in the new law, however, allowed for women to work out of their home, and so she started a business designing and sewing dresses. |
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A Fine and Pleasant Misery | Patrick F. McManus “The more you talked about the miseries of life in the woods,” writes Patrick McManus, “the more you wanted to get back out there and start suffering again. Camping was a fine and pleasant misery.” If you’ve ever pitched a tent or hit the trail, McManus’s writing will make you laugh in recognition of the miserable joys of the great outdoors. |
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Guests of the Sheik | Elizabeth Warnock Fernea In 1956, Elizabeth Fernea was a newlywed. Her husband’s field research in anthropology took the couple to a small, rural Iraqi village. In a friendly, intimate tone, Fernea tells the story of her two years there, which she begins as an American woman knowing next to nothing about Iraqi culture, language, or mores, resentful of the abaya she is required to wear; and ends as a close friend to the women of El Nahra. |
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The Happiness Project | Gretchen Rubin One day, while riding a bus in New York City, Gretchen Rubin realized that despite her fabulous life—good, kind husband, two beautiful daughters, a writing career—she wasn’t quite, exactly, thoroughly happy. Deciding that she wanted to “feel grateful for ordinary days,” she embarked on a happiness project, which was a year-long experiment in different approaches to happiness. |
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The Housekeeper and the Professor | Yoko Ogawa He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem — ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. |
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I Miss You When I Blink | Mary Laura Philpott “I miss you when I blink”: A sentence coined by her son when he was six that came to help Mary Laura Philpott start to understand her life. Especially once she had “made it,” once she had a home and a husband and a job and some kids but still found herself just…herself. |
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In the Heart of the Sea | Nathaniel Philbrick Did you know that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was actually based on a true story? Philbrick takes you on an exciting tale of seafaring, a whale attack, survival, starvation and the eventual cannibalism of the crew. This National Book Award winner is a must read. |
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The Last Lecture | Randy Pausch The tradition of the “last lecture” is an old one; a retiring professor gives his last remarks, with the idea of transmitting one final bit of lasting wisdom. When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, gave his last lecture, he knew it was vital to express his wisdom, as he was dying from pancreatic cancer. |
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The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book | Wendy Welch When Wendy Welch decided to open a used book store in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, she knew that fulfilling this ambition would be difficult given the economy, the proliferation of e-readers, and, of course, Amazon. Rather than just a place to buy books, she created a community resource where readers of all sorts make connections with others in the community and the reading world at large. |
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat | Oliver Sacks An 88-year-old woman, somewhat deaf, awakens one night to the sound of music from her childhood playing loudly. The songs don’t come from any radio but play loudly and repeatedly in her head. Her ENT and psychiatrist can’t find anything wrong, but her neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks, eventually figures out what’s causing the music: a small stroke in the woman’s temporal lobe. That’s just one of the stories Dr. Sacks writes about in this collection of neurological case studies. |
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Mere Christianity | C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity is C.S. Lewis’s forceful and accessible doctrine of Christian belief. In this classic, C.S. Lewis explores the common ground upon which all of those of Christian faith stand together. |
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Mrs. Mike | Benedict Freedman Mrs. Mike is the true story of Katherine Mary O’Fallon, a young Irish girl from Boston, who marries Canadian Mountie Sergeant Mike Flannigan, who is priest, doctor and magistrate to all in the wilderness of the North Woods of Canada. Extremely popular, the novel has won the hearts of millions for its depiction of young love’s journey to maturity. |
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My Grandfather’s Blessings | Rachel Remen Having grown up emotionally divided between the religious devoutness of her rabbi grandfather and the academic world of her parents, Remen shares with her readers the lessons she learned as she consolidated these two views and embraced healing. |
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No Ordinary Life : An Autobiography of Helen Mar Carter Monson | Helen Mar Carter Monson Helen Mar Carter Monson survives the aftermath of WWI, the deadly flu epidemic of 1918, sliding down a haystack into a convict’s lap, the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, skinny-dipping in the penitentiary pond, and two broken noses, among many other adventures. These true stories, originally told to entertain bored children, are written in vivid, first-person description. |
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Once Upon a Town | Bob Greene They began almost immediately, just after the attack on Pearl Harbor: the people of a tiny town in Nebraska started feeding the soldiers who came through North Platte by the trainful. Chicago Times columnist Bob Greene explores this little-known story from World War II, showing how the kindness of strangers changed lives. |
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Same Kind of Different as Me | Ron Hall Ron, an international art dealer, is wealthy, with a supportive wife and a beautiful home, whereas Denver grew up a modern-day slave in Louisiana before escaping to a life on the streets. They are united by Ron’s wife Debbie who is dying of cancer. Debbie asks Denver to maintain the ministry she began for homeless people in Fort Worth, Texas, and through this work the two men’s disparate lives weave together to form a friendship that redeems them both. |
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The Small and the Mighty | Sharon McMahon A heartfelt, inspiring portrait of twelve ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country. Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are often ordinary people who didn't make it into the textbooks. McMahon's cast of improbable champions will become familiar friends, lighting the path we journey in our quest to make the world more just, peaceful, good, and free. |
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Solito: a memoir | Javier Zamora At nine years old, Javier embarks on a two-week, three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. But those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside a group of strangers who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family. |
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The Soul of An Octopus | Sy Montomery Octopuses are fascinating! Montgomery’s interest in them was sparked one day at the New England Aquarium, where an octopus named Athena reached her tentacles towards her. These intelligent creatures play games, solve puzzles, change colors to show their moods, and interact surprisingly well with their human handlers. Montgomery explores both the octopuses’ world and the people who take care of them, creating a book that will both surprise and delight as it reveals this fascinating animal. |
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The Speckled Monster | Jennifer Lee Carrell Smallpox was a dreaded disease in the early Eighteenth century. Choosing to give oneself a form of the disease seemed tantamount to murder. However, Jennifer Carrell, a writer for Smithsonian, tells the story of two proponents of vaccination. One, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu takes her cause all the way to King George I. The other, Dr. Zabdiel Bylston, faced public opposition in Boston for his early vaccination work, learned from local slaves. |
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down | Anne Fadiman In the small community of Merced, California, reside thousands of Hmong refugees from the highlands of Laos; among them is the Lee family, whose youngest daughter Lia suffers from severe epilepsy. Anne Fadiman attempts to shed light on Hmong culture and understand the seemingly irreconcilable differences between western medicine and the Hmong in this poignant narrative. |
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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers | Mary Roach A crash-test dummy. (What happens to a body when it’s in a car crash?) A subject in an Army Ordnance Department experiment. (Just how, exactly, do bomb shells affect human flesh?) An anthropological assistant. (What happens to a body as it decomposes in, say, a block of cement?) Those are just a few examples of how a body can be useful after dying, the main thread in Mary Roach’s book. |
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Until I Say Good-bye: My Year of Living with Joy | Susan Spencer-Wendel At 44, Susan Spencer-Wendel was an award-winning journalist writing for the Palm Beach Post, with three kids and a happy marriage. One day, her left hand started shriveling; it was the onset of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Once she knew the name of her illness and what it would entail she made a choice to seek happiness and fulfilling experiences in whatever time she had left. |
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A Walk in the Woods | Bill Bryson Weaving from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Tail (AT) takes hikers through 2,100 miles of mountains and forests, the longest swath of nature in America. Bill Bryson started on the trail at its southern-most point in Georgia with the goal of hiking the entire length. Then he wrote about his adventures on the trail. |
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What Would Cleopatra Do? Life Lessons from Fifty of History’s Most Extraordinary Women | Elizabeth Foley and Beth Coates This illustrated book is not just a collection of short histories of famous women. It helps us understand both the impact of the decisions and actions of such women as Frida Kahlo, Catherine the Great, Boudica, and Hedy Lamar during their own time period, as well as the influence they can have upon us in our current situations. |
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The World’s Strongest Librarian | Josh Hanagarne Josh Hanagrarne first developed the tics of Tourette’s Syndrome when he was six, on stage acting the role of a tree in his first-grade play. The syndrome—which he nicknamed Misty—came to influence almost all of his life. Now a librarian at the downtown Salt Lake City library, Hanagarne mixes his personal narrative with the tales of a metropolitan library, creating a funny, moving memoir that explores faith, books, limitations, family, adaptations, and the lengths we will go to in order to save ourselves. |
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The Wright Brothers | David McCullough Mankind’s historic first flight, accomplished at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina by the Wright brothers, is a well-known tale. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer David McCullough develops the details of the story that are not as widely known, especially the help of Wilber and Orville Wright’s sister, Katharine, whose assistance had a far-larger role that most people know. |
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The Blue Castle | L. M. Montgomery When 29-year-old Valancy Stirling (the plain, quite spinster of her family) receives the surprising news that she has a fatal heart condition, she decides to entirely change whatever life she has left to live. Rather than quietly obeying the conscriptions and directions of her family, she starts making her own choices, including making friends with the town drunk and a vagabond. |
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I’ll Be Your Blue Sky | Marissa de los Santos Clare Hobbes isn’t sure: are her fiancé Zach’s temper flares just a quirk of his personality or something darker? On the weekend of her wedding, a chance encounter with an older woman named Edith helps her to see her troubles clearly, and she decides to call off her wedding. Shortly after, she is surprised to find that Edith had passed away and left her beachfront home in Delaware to Clare. |
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The Bookish Life of Nina Hill | Abbi Waxman Nina Hill is comfortable in her life, she spends a lot of time alone, not talking to people. When the father she never knew dies, and leaves something to her in his will; suddenly her solitude is interrupted by sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, and cousins she never knew. |
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Ellie and the Harpmaker | Hazel Prior Whenever she can get away, Ellie Jacobs takes long walks through the English countryside near the home she shares with her husband Clive. On one walk, she discovers the barn/workshop of Dan Hollis, who is a harp maker. When he discovers that she has wanted to learn to play the harp, Dan gives her one, but because Clive objects to the gift, she keeps it in Dan’s barn, where she secretly learns to play. |
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Edenbrooke | Julianne Donaldson When Marianne receives an invitation to spend the summer with her twin sister in Edenbrooke, she has no idea of the romance and adventure that await her once she meets the dashing Sir Philip.
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Happiness for Beginners | Katherine Center A year after getting divorced, Helen Carpenter, thirty-two, lets her annoying younger brother talk her into signing up for a wilderness survival course. Thus begins the strangest adventure of Helen's well-behaved life: three weeks in the remotest wilderness of a mountain range in Wyoming where she will survive mosquito infestations, a surprise summer blizzard, a group of sorority girls, and her brother's even-more-annoying best friend. |
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The Music Shop | Rachel Joyce In the late 1980s in an English suburb, Frank owns a music shop, where he uses his special skill—knowing what song or album a particular customer needs to hear—to keep the shop open. But only barely, as a developer is attempting to overtake Unity Street and most customers want CDs now, not vinyl. |
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The House in the Cerulean Sea | TJ Klune Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he’s given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside. |
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The Measure | Nikki Erlick It seems like any other day: You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live. From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean? As society comes together and pulls apart, everyone faces the same shocking choice: Do they wish to know how long they’ll live? |
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A Wizard of Earthsea | Ursula K. Le Guin Ged, an overconfident boy, must survive his training and daunting experiences to become a master wizard. |
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A Wrinkle in Time | Madeline L’Engle Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and her new friend Calvin O’Keefe travel through space, with the help of Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which, to find her father, who has vanished. They find him imprisoned by the powerful IT on the planet of Camazotz, where all people are identical. As much an exploration of good and evil, the consequence of individuality, and the power of loving people as it is an intergalactic adventure, A Wrinkle in Time won the 1963 Newbery Medal and changed the lives of countless readers. |
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Frankenstein | Mary Shelley Victor Frankenstein, compelled to find the meaning of life and of death, creates a living being from the body parts of dead people, but his creation is monstrous to him. |
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My Real Children | Joe Walton Jo Walton’s novel My Real Children is hard to pin down: part alternate-universe, part family saga, part love story, part travelogue, what it really does is explore the consequences of choice. |
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The Goose Girl | Shannon Hale Princess Anidori is born with a word on her tongue, which means as she grows she learns, under her aunt’s encouragement, how to speak to animals. This strangeness does not sit well with the queen, so when the king dies, Princess Ani’s mother forges a marriage between her and the prince of Bayern, a neighboring country. But Ani’s betrayal by trusted people is just beginning; on her way to Bayern her friend Selia plots to kill Ani and take her place. |
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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe | C. S. Lewis When the Pevensies, four children from England, stumble upon a connection between our world and Narnia, they discover magic, talking animals, friendly satyrs, and a battle between good and evil. |
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Migrations | Charlotte McConaghy Fanny Stone lives on an earth on the brink of environmental collapse. For most of her life, she’s followed the ocean’s tides and the flights of birds, escaping the memories of her traumatic experiences. She travels to Greenland, where she convinces the captain of a fishing boat, The Saghani, to sail south in an attempt to follow what will likely be the last migration of the last flock of Arctic terns. |
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The Rules of Magic | Alice Hoffman The curse on the Owens family began in Massachusetts in the 1620s, when Maria Owens was accused of witchcraft. It lingers still in Susanna Owens, living in New York City in the 1960s with her three children, Franny, Jet, and Vincent. She teaches them the rules for living in order to avoid the curse: no cats, no candles, no black clothes. Definitely no books about magic, or walking in moonlight, and absolutely no falling in love. |
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The Snow Child | Eowyn Ivey It is the story of Jack and Mabel, who’ve left their fairly safe but exceedingly sad life in 1920’s Pennsylvania for the Alaskan frontier. Sad because, except for one stillborn, they never were able to have children, and all of the family reminders around them (the nieces and nephews, the new babies, the excited couples marrying) were just too much. |
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Spinning Silver | Naomi Novik Told through the voices of three women, Spinning Silver is a reworking of the “Rumplestiltskin” fairy tale blended with aspects of Russian mythology. |
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The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle | Stuart Turton Every day Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others. |
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The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | Agatha Christie Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Then he is stabbed to death. |
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The Thursday Murder Club | Richard Osman In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves The Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. |
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Bellfield Hall, or, the Observations of Miss Dido Kent | Anna Dean Dido Kent, at 35 years old, is considered to be a hopeless spinster—but solving mysteries gives her life a sense of purpose. Dido’s niece Catherine is heartbroken, as her fiancé has abruptly called off the engagement. He vanishes, and then a murdered woman is found on the grounds of Bellfield Hall, and Dido must figure out if the two are connected. |
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Rebecca | Daphne Du Maurier When she arrives at Manderley, the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter discovers not all is as expected. Her husband’s first wife, the seemingly-brilliant, talented, and beautiful Rebecca, haunts both the house itself and its occupants. Attempting to establish her marriage and her place within the house, Mrs. de Winter is challenged at every turn by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. |
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The Distant Hours | Kate Morton In contemporary London, Edie receives a letter that was mailed to her mother nearly fifty years ago and only just arrived. Her normally mellow mother reacts so strongly to the letter—which came from one of the three sisters she lived with in Middlehurst castle in Kent during the Blitz—that Edie decides to investigate. |
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Maisie Dobbs | Jacqueline Winspear Maisie Dobbs, the new maid at the London home of the suffragette Lady Rowan Compton, is not an average maid. She’s only thirteen, and she can read, and she sneaks into the manor’s library to study European philosophy. When Lady Compton discovers Maisie’s precocious intellect, she becomes her patron, eventually sending her off to college, but the Great War interrupts Maisie’s education. She volunteers as a nurse and then, when the war ends, decides to become a private detective. |
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The Ballad of Frankie Silver | Sharyn McCrumb The Appalachian wilderness comes to life in this novel that explores the mystery of what happened to Frankie Silver, hanged for murder in a small North Carolina town in 1833. In contemporary Tennessee, Sherriff Spencer Arrowood investigates a different murder, perhaps committed by a young woman who grew up poor in the mountains, Fate Harkryder. The two murders—and the two young women moving through a legal system that fails them—begin to weave together as Spencer works to uncover the truth. |
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Migrations | Charlotte McConaghy Fanny Stone lives on an earth on the brink of environmental collapse. For most of her life, she’s followed the ocean’s tides and the flights of birds, escaping the memories of her traumatic experiences. She travels to Greenland, where she convinces the captain of a fishing boat, The Saghani, to sail south in an attempt to follow what will likely be the last migration of the last flock of Arctic terns. |
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Peace Like a River | Leif Enger After years of work with Minnesota Public Radio, storyteller Leif Enger weaves together a beautiful expression of love. The novel follows a young family in a heroic trek to find their fugitive brother. Although none of the family finds what they expected, Enger blends faith and hope in a story of family, sacrifice, and religion. The writing is delightful and the story meaningful. |
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The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place | Julie Berry The seven students at St. Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies have formed a pleasant little sisterhood away from their horrible families. But when the school’s headmistress and her brother die during their Sunday meal, their situation is threated. So they do what any clever girls would do: hide the bodies and carry on. |
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The Secret Keeper | Kate Morton Avoiding her siblings by hiding in a tree house during a family party, 16-year-old Laurel witnesses her mother kill a man who appears to be an intruder. But fifty years later, when she is an accomplished actress and her mother is near death, Laurel rediscovers questions she has about what she witnessed. |
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The Unwedding | Ally Condie Ellery Wainwright is alone at the edge of the world. She and her husband, Luke, were supposed to spend their twentieth wedding anniversary together at the luxurious Resort at Broken Point in Big Sur, California. But now she’s traveling solo. |
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The Goose Girl | Shannon Hale Princess Anidori is born with a word on her tongue, which means as she grows she learns, under her aunt’s encouragement, how to speak to animals. This strangeness does not sit well with the queen, so when the king dies, Princess Ani’s mother forges a marriage between her and the prince of Bayern, a neighboring country. But Ani’s betrayal by trusted people is just beginning; on her way to Bayern her friend Selia plots to kill Ani and take her place. |
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Moon Over Manifest | Clare Vanderpool Abilene Tucker's father, Gideon, has sent her back to live in Manifest for the summer, thinking she’ll be safer there than living a drifter lifestyle with him. While there she discovers the decades-old mystery of The Rattler along with new friends and a boxful of old objects that lead her to Gideon’s history. |
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The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place | Julie Berry The seven students at St. Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies have formed a pleasant little sisterhood away from their horrible families. But when the school’s headmistress and her brother die during their Sunday meal, their situation is threated. So they do what any clever girls would do: hide the bodies and carry on. |
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Summerlost | Ally Condie A year ago, Cedar’s father and brother Ben were killed by a drunk driver, and to help everyone cope her mom has moved what’s left of her family to the small town of Iron Creek, Utah. Cedar finds a friend, the quirky Leo, who helps her get a job at the town’s Shakespeare Festival, Summerlost. When they’re not working, the two friends discuss the mysterious life of an actress who haunts the sets of the festival’s stage. |
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The Outsiders | S. E. Hinton The Outsiders is the story of Ponyboy, Soda, Johnny; Cherry, Bob, Marcia—the Greasers and the Socs and their rumbles against each other. Capturing the violence in the contrast of social structures, S.E. Hinton’s novel, written when she was still in high school, explores the way that both groups must come to terms with adult experiences such as fear, loss, and love. |
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The Running Dream | Wendelin Van Draanen 16-year-old Jessica Carlisle, is her high school track team’s star 400-meter racer. But when she loses her leg in an accident, her identity seems to be amputated as well. What is life worth to a person who lives to run but only has one leg? She discovers that finding the worth in life is a little bit like running: the spark has to come from her. |
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The Book Thief | Markus Zusak The Book Thief rotates around an unlikely pair: the narrator—death—and the young Liesel Meminger, whose father has disappeared for being a communist and whose mother soon vanishes. On the way to a foster home in Musling, Germany, her younger brother dies, and at the small grave side service, she steals a book from one of the grave diggers about how to dig graves. |
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The Fountains of Silence | Ruta Sepetys Daniel, an 18-year-old American who is in Madrid with his parents, is trying to capture the city through his camera lens. Ana is a young woman working at the Castellana Hilton whose parents were executed for their anti-Fascist politics. Her brother Rafa, who promotes the bullfights. Their cousin Puri, who works in an orphanage. In 1957, the lives of these four young adults intertwine in the Spanish city, ruled by Franco’s politics and made dark by secrets. |
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The Witch of Blackbird Pond | Elizabeth George Spears When her beloved grandfather dies, Kit Tyler is orphaned, and so must sail from Barbados to the village of Wethersfield in the colony of Connecticut. When she strikes up a friendship with an old woman named Hannah—thought to be a witch—she must confront the society’s narrow moral views. |
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A Wizard of Earthsea | Ursula K. Le Guin Ged, an overconfident boy, must survive his training and daunting experiences to become a master wizard. |
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A Wrinkle in Time | Madeline L’Engle Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and her new friend Calvin O’Keefe travel through space, with the help of Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which, to find her father, who has vanished. They find him imprisoned by the powerful IT on the planet of Camazotz, where all people are identical. As much an exploration of good and evil, the consequence of individuality, and the power of loving people as it is an intergalactic adventure, A Wrinkle in Time won the 1963 Newbery Medal and changed the lives of countless readers. |
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Spinning Silver | Naomi Novik Told through the voices of three women, Spinning Silver is a reworking of the “Rumplestiltskin” fairy tale blended with aspects of Russian mythology. |
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I Heard the Owl Call My Name | Margaret Craven I Heard the Owl Call My Name is the simple yet powerful story of a young vicar sent to live with the Kwakiutl tribe in the Pacific Northwest. Unaware of his own impending death, he finds that the tribe’s ways are being eroded by an encroaching American culture. |
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Bruiser | Neal Shusterman Brewster Rawlins: the high school kid voted “most likely to get the death penalty,” the tall, ambling quiet boy built like a tank but almost always covered in bruises and cuts and even casts for broken arms. What’s his story? Tennyson Sternberger doesn’t know, and doesn’t care to find out, until his twin sister Bronte announces she’s going on a date with Brewster. |
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After the Dancing Days | Margaret Rostkowski Young Annie learns about the horrors of World War I through the suffering and stories of wounded soldiers recovering in a veterans’ hospital near her small Kansas hometown. |
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A Monster Calls | Patrick Ness Thirteen-year-old Conor awakens one night to find a monster outside his bedroom window, but not the one from the recurring nightmare that began when his mother became ill–an ancient, wild creature that wants him to face truth and loss. |
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