Summary: Raised by his grandmother in Chicago’s South Side, young Claude McKay Love hopes going away to college in Missouri will help him escape the havoc of his life there, but he discovers in this coming-of-age story that it’s not so easy to leave your past behind—or find a safe place to land.
Summary: In this captivating dual narrative novel, a modern-day woman discovers remarkable parallels between her own life and her home’s previous owner, a quintessential 1950s housewife whose hidden notes inspire her to discover what it means to be a wife fighting for her place in a patriarchal society.
Summary: Olive, Again is a novel-in-stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge. The iconic Olive struggles to understand not only herself and her own life but the lives of those around her in the town of Crosby, Maine.
Summary: What if your memories could live on in someone else? "One of the top nine young adult science fiction novels of all time." - The Huffington Post
Summary: It is 1320, 25 years since Beatrice lived in Montaillou, but the past she has tried to forget is about to catch up with her.
Summary: The Real Education of TJ Crowley puts the themes of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in overdrive in an unflinching look at racism in the late 1960s.
Summary: A beautifully written and absorbing novel about civil rights; architecture and place; the wrenching experience of becoming an adult; first love; and ordinary people making extraordinary choices.
Summary: An acclaimed comic novel about literary creation, mass incarceration, and settling a few scores.
Summary: A mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar's violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both.
Summary: Philomena meets The Orphan Train in this suspenseful, provocative novel.
Summary: A powerful and luminous story of grief and coming-of-age and a beautiful tribute to the relationship between a father and daughter.
Summary: Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. She is a famous painter and her husband, Gabriel, an in-demand fashion photographer. Until one evening, when Gabriel returns home late from work and Alicia shoots him five times in the face and then never speaks another word. #1 New York Times bestseller.
Summary: Edward St. Aubyn offers his readers the often darkly funny and self-loathing world of privilege as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story of abuse, addiction, and recovery from the age of five into early middle age.
Summary: She was beautiful. She was a genius. Could the world handle both? A powerful novel based on the incredible true story of the glamour icon and scientist Hedy Lamarr, whose groundbreaking invention revolutionized modern communication.
Summary: In the world of the near future, who will control women’s bodies? Timeless, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid’s Tale, written in 1989, is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and topical tour de force.
Summary: In the near future, a cyborg Joan of Arc is born who can cause earthquakes with her fists. She is the last hope to reverse accelerating climate change, and challenge a dictator who would enslave the remnants of humanity as the Earth becomes uninhabitable. A poet named Christine, trapped aboard a space station, looks down and writes the epic story of their battle.
Summary: Beginning in 1910 during the time of Japanese colonization and ending many decades later in 1989, Pachinko is the epic saga of a Korean family told over four generations. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
Summary: Based on a remarkable true story. Seven-year-old Chellamuthu's life--and his destiny--is forever changed when he is kidnapped from his village in Southern India and sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children.
Summary: Set in Nigeria, Stay With Me, gives voice to both husband and wife as they tell the story of their marriage--and the forces that threaten to tear it apart.
Summary: The story of Morayo Da Silva, a seventy-five year old, cosmopolitan Nigerian woman living in hip San Francisco.
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