Awfully Sweet Fiction
Discover heartwarming and delightful fiction with Awfully Sweet Fiction. Explore our curated list of sweet, uplifting books perfect for cozy reading moments and feel-good stories.
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The Banquet Bug
by Geling Yan
"When factory worker Dan Dong accidentally discovers how easy it is to infiltrate state- and corporate-sponsored banquets by posing as a journalist, he quickly becomes addicted to the insane luxury of these meals. For the first time, he tastes crab-claw tips, exotic fungi, and a dish made from thousands of pigeon tongues arranged in the shape of a chrysanthemum. But when Dan's disguise enables him to become privy to a deep-rooted scandal, his conscience compels him to cross the line between subterfuge and reality by actually writing an expose. With the help of the witty, jaded reporter Happy Gao, Dan embarks on a journey that will take him from the highest rungs of society to its most sordid depths." "Throughout the book, food - from the spicy, oily fare Dan orders for a high-class prostitute at a restaurant called Pink Chamber, to the humble noodle dishes prepared by his long-suffering wife, Little Plum - is present on almost every page, described so vividly that you can almost smell and taste it. But by the final page of The Banquet Bug, it has become clear that the perils of consumption run parallel to its pleasures."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Observations
by Jane Harris
In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy takes a job as a maid. Her "missus" demands Bessy keep a journal of her thoughts in this powerful story of secrets and suspicions, hidden histories, and mysterious disappearances.
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Beachglass
by Wendy Blackburn
Self-depreciating and bitingly smart, Delia is a recovering addict who forges her own brand of hard won wisdom on her journey in sobriety. Following a phone call from Timothy whom she met in rehab, Delia leaves her husband and child in Seattle to care for him as he dies.
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Goodnight, Texas
by William James Cobb
In Goodnight, Texas, people struggle to survive job loss, severe over-fishing, and a looming hurricane. This lyrical, romantic, comic, and redemptive story is about wanting what one cannot have, love amid the ruins, survival, connection, and hope.
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After Dark
by ćä¸ćĽć¨š
With his trademark humor and psychological insight, Murakami's power of observation plays out in this sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn.
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We are All Welcome Here
by Elizabeth Berg
The bestselling author of "The Art of Mending" and "The Year of Pleasures" follows the story of three women in 1965, Tupelo, Mississippi, each struggling against overwhelming odds for her own kind of freedom.
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Abide with Me
by Elizabeth Strout
After the tragic death of his young wife, Reverend Tyler Caskey, a New England minister, struggles to hold together his own life, his family, and his town, while dealing with his personal anger, grief, and loss of faith.
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Magic Study
by Maria V. Snyder
The second novel in Snyder's Study series. After saving the Commander's life, Yelena is set free to get her magic under control or be destroyed by the other wizards for disrupting the order of things.
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The Whistling Season
by Ivan Doig
The saga of how a widow from Minneapolis and her brother--soon to become the new teacher in a tiny Montana community in 1909--change lives in unexpected ways has all the charm of old-school storytelling, from Dickens to Laura Ingalls Wilder.
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The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
A young man born of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens to his thirties.
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On Agate Hill
by Lee Smith
Molly Petree, orphaned by the Civil War, is by her own definition "a spitfire and a burden. I do not care. My family is a dead family, and this is not my home, for I am a refugee girl." Raised in the ruins of a once prosperous plantation on Agate Hill in North Carolina, she's a refugee who has no interest in self-pity. To document her headstrong life, she collects its artifacts--her lifelong diaries, letters, poems, songs, newspaper clippings, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, bones (some human, some not). When a mysterious benefactor appears out of her father's past to rescue her, teenaged Molly Petree never looks back. Taking what she is offered, she saves herself and then risks everything to hold true to her nature and to true love. She casts aside two prosperous, well-born suitors to marry a dashing--and philandering--mountaineer only to be accused of his murder. The end of Molly Petree's story is as unpredictable and as passionate as her own wide-open heart. Spanning half a century, Lee Smith's portrait of a fiery Southern woman recalls the South from Reconstruction to the Roaring Twenties--and, in the process, gives us Molly Petree, living and breathing, gripping the reader's arm as the story unfolds.
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The God of Animals
by Aryn Kyle
Based on the author's short story titled "The Foaling Season," the tale of rancher's daughter Alice Winston finds her helping to support the family business by boarding the horses of rich neighbors and leaving behind the innocence of her youth.
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Good Grief
by Lolly Winston
Thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton desperately wants to be a good widow-a graceful, composed, Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, she is more of the Jack Daniels kind. Self-medicating with ice cream for breakfast, breaking down at the supermarket, and showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers-soon she's not only lost her husband, but her job, house...and waistline. With humor and chutzpah Sophie leaves town, determined to reinvent her life. But starting over has its hurdles; soon she's involved with a thirteen-year-old who has a fascination with fire, and a handsome actor who inspires a range of feelings she can't cope with-yet.
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Happiness Sold Separately
by Lolly Winston
"The marriage of a seemingly perfect couple dissolves into a complicated dance of affairs, lovers, and admirers"--Provided by the publisher.
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The Whole World Over
by Julia Glass
From the author of the beloved novel "Three Junes" comes a rich and commanding story about the accidents, both grand and small, that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie Duquette, openhearted yet stubborn, devotes most of her passionate attention to her Greenwich Village bakery and her four- year- old son, George. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, a traditional gay man who has become her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. It is at Walter' s restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie' s coconut cake and decides to woo her away from the city to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts-- and finds herself heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision will change the course of several lives within and beyond Greenie' s orbit. Alan, alone in New York, must face down his demons; Walter, eager for platonic distraction, takes in his teenage nephew. Yet Walter cannot steer clear of love trouble, and despite his enforced solitude, Alan is still surrounded by women: his powerful sister, an old flame, and an animal lover named Saga, who grapples with demons all her own. As for Greenie, living in the shadow of a charismatic politician leads to a series of unforeseen consequences that separate her from her only child. We watch as folly, chance, and determination pull all these lives together and apart over a year that culminates in the fall of the twin towers at the World Trade Center, an event that will affirm or confound the choices each character has made-- or has refused to face. Julia Glass is at her besthere, weaving a glorious tapestry of lives and lifetimes, of places and people, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others. In "The Whole World Over" she has given us another tale that pays tribute to the extraordinary complexities of love.
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The Brambles
by Eliza Minot
This is the story of the Bramble family--Margaret, Max, and Edie--three adult siblings careening through wildly different byways of adult life. Margaret, mother of three, drowning in a sea of runny noses and lost mittens, is a nurturer with a sense of humor, a witty woman at wits' end, about to take her ailing father into the tumult and chaos of her already overcrowded home. Edie, her younger sister, is a barely recognizable version of Margaret's former self--young, single, clicking smartly down city streets in good shoes, but struggling mightily beyond her sister's vision to anchor her desultory, and intensely solitary, life. Max, newly married, newly a father, is buckling under the weight of new responsibilities. Over the course of one critical season, a long-hidden secret will be revealed, remaking each of them, and all they thought they knew about one another and about themselves. -- From publisher description.
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One Mississippi
by Mark Childress
Struggling with his outsider status after moving to a small Mississippi town at the beginning of his junior year, 1970s teen Daniel Musgrove befriends fellow misfit Tim, with whom he becomes embroiled in a devastating chain of events following a car accident from which the community's first African-American prom queen awakens believing she is white. 25,000 first printing.
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Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
Tells the alliance of George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur a shabby genteel Edinburgh, their adventures, triumphs, and set-backs.
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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER ⢠WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE ⢠A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged foodâand each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.
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The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sonsâtheir love, their sacrifices, their lies. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner tells a sweeping story of family, love, and friendship against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, bringing to mind the large canvases of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. But just as it is old-fashioned in its narration, it is contemporary in its subject-the devastating history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, the #1 New York Times bestseller A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. âJust as good, if not better, than Khaled Hosseiniâs best-selling first book, The Kite Runner.ââNewsweek Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.
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The Sea
by John Banville
Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.
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The Mermaid Chair
by Sue Monk Kidd
A transcendent tale of a woman's self-discoveryâthe New York Timesâbestselling second work of fiction by the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings Inside the church of a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. When Jessie Sullivan is summoned home to the island to cope with her eccentric motherâs seemingly inexplicable behavior, she is living a conventional life with her husband, Hugh, a life âmolded to the smallest space possible.â Jessie loves Hugh, but once on the island, she finds herself drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk about to take his final vows. Amid a rich community of unforgettable island women and the exotic beauty of marshlands, tidal creeks, and majestic egrets, Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, with a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right, and with the immutable force of home and marriage. Is the power of the mermaid chair only a myth? Or will it alter the course of Jessieâs life? What happens will unlock the roots of her motherâs tormented past, but most of all, it will allow Jessie to discover selfhood and a place of belonging as she explores the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic.
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The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd
The multi-million bestselling novel about a young girl's journey towards healing and the transforming power of love, from the award-winning author of The Invention of Wings and The Book of Longings Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted Black "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolinaâa town that holds the secret to her mother's past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of Black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna. This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.
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History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
A #1 New York Times bestseller by Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeperâs Daughter is a brilliantly crafted novel of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love Kim Edwardsâs stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964 in Lexington, Kentucky, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a centuryâin which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that winter night long ago. A family drama, The Memory Keeperâs Daughter explores every mother's silent fear: What would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? It is also an astonishing tale of love and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets are finally uncovered.
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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
by Lisa See
Lily is haunted by memoriesâof who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness. In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (âwomenâs writingâ). Some girls were paired with laotongs, âold sames,â in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become âold samesâ at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.
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The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
In a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, but their world--and Sai's romance with her handsome Nepali tutor--is threatened by a Nepalese insurgency. By the author of Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
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Blue Shoes and Happiness
by Alexander McCall Smith
Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladiesâ Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswanaâs premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotsweâwith help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsiânavigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea. Life is good for Mma Ramotswe as she sets out with her usual resolve to solve peopleâs problems, heal their misfortunes, and untangle the mysteries that make life interesting. And life is never dull on Tlokweng Road. A new and rather too brusque advice columnist is appearing in the local paper. Then, a cobra is found in the offices of the No. 1 Ladiesâ Detective Agency. Recently, the Mokolodi Game Preserve manager feels an infectious fear spreading among his workers, and a local doctor may be falsifying blood pressure readings. To further complicate matters, Grace Makutsi may have scared off her own fiancĂŠ. Mma Ramotswe, however, is always up to the challenge. And Blue Shoes and Happiness will not fail to entertain Alexander McCall Smithâs oldest fans and newest converts with its great wit, charm, and great good will.
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Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.