books for my friends
Discover the perfect books for your friends with our curated list of top reads. Find heartfelt gifts, thrilling page-turners, and must-read recommendations for every book lover.

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A Walk to Remember
by Nicholas Sparks
A high school rebel and a minister's daughter find strength in each other in this star-crossed tale of "young but everlasting love" (Chicago Sun-Times). There was a time when the world was sweeter....when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats.... Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town's Baptist minister....Jamie, who was destined to show him the depths of the human heart-and the joy and pain of living. The inspiration for this novel came from Nicholas Sparks's sister: her life and her courage. From the internationally bestselling author Nicholas Sparks, comes his most moving story yet....

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Sloppy Firsts
by Megan McCafferty
Devastated when her best friend moves away, sixteen-year-old Jessica Darling feels isolated at school and at home, as she struggles to deal with her father's obsession with her track meets, her boy-crazy peers, and her own nonexistent love life.

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Second Helpings
by Megan McCafferty
Critics and readers alike fell in love with "Sloppy Firsts, " McCafferty's first novel and the debut of the saucy, irreverent Jessica Darling. Well, Jessica is a senior now at Pineville High. Fall in love with Jessica all over again in this wonderful sequel to the best high school novel in years.


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The Prince
by Niccolo Machiavelli
Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor The Prince even today remains a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince . . . a king . . . a president. When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic. In The Prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values; his prince would be man and beast, fox and lion. Today, this small sixteenth-century masterpiece has become essential reading for every student of government, and is the ultimate book on power politics.

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Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky give us a brilliantly faithful rendition of this classic novel, in all its tragedy and tormented comedy. In this second edition, they have updated their translation in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.


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The Monk
by Matthew Gregory Lewis
`The Monk was so highly popular that it seemed to create an epoch in our literature', wrote Sir Walter Scott. Set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid, The Monk is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest. The great struggle between maintaining monastic vows and fulfilling personal ambitions leads its main character, the monk Ambrosio, to temptation and the breaking of his vows, then to sexual obsession and rape, and finally to murder in order to conceal his guilt. Inspired by German horror romanticism and the work of Ann Radcliffe, Lewis produced his masterpiece at the age of nineteen. It contains many typical Gothic elements - seduction in a monastery, lustful monks, evil Abbesses, bandits and beautiful heroines. But, as the Introduction to this new edition shows, Lewis also played with convention, ranging from gruesome realism to social comedy, and even parodied the genre in which he was writing.
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Kitchen
by Banana Yoshimoto
Two stories, "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow," told through the eyes of a pair of contemporary young japanese women, deal with the themes of mothers, love, transsexuality, kitchens, and tragedy.


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Confessions of a Shopaholic
by Sophie Kinsella
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Party Crasher and Love Your Life comes “a hilarious tale . . . hijinks worthy of classic I Love Lucy episodes . . . too good to pass up.” (USA Today) “Sophie Kinsella keeps her finger on the cultural pulse, while leaving me giddy with laughter.”—Jojo Moyes, author of The Giver of Stars and The Last Letter from Your Lover Becky Bloomwood has a fabulous flat in London’s trendiest neighborhood, a troupe of glamorous socialite friends, and a closet brimming with the season’s must-haves. The only trouble is, she can’t actually afford it—not any of it. Her job writing at Successful Saving magazine not only bores her to tears, it doesn’t pay much at all. And lately Becky’s been chased by dismal letters from the bank—letters with large red sums she can’t bear to read. She tries cutting back. But none of her efforts succeeds. Her only consolation is to buy herself something . . . just a little something. Finally a story arises that Becky actually cares about, and her front-page article catalyzes a chain of events that will transform her life—and the lives of those around her—forever. Praise for Sophie Kinsella and Confessions of a Shopaholic “Kinsella’s Bloomwood is plucky and funny. . . . You won’t have to shop around to find a more winning protagonist.”—People “If a crème brûlée could be transmogrified into a book, it would be Confessions of a Shopaholic.”—The Star-Ledger “A have-your-cake-and-eat-it romp, done with brio and not a syllable of moralizing. . . . Kinsella has a light touch and puckish humor.”—Kirkus Reviews

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Shopaholic Ties the Knot
by Sophie Kinsella
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Party Crasher and Love Your Life . . . “Sophie Kinsella keeps her finger on the cultural pulse, while leaving me giddy with laughter.”—Jojo Moyes, author of The Giver of Stars and The Last Letter from Your Lover Life has been good to Becky Bloomwood: She’s become the top personal shopper at Barneys and she’s living happily with her boyfriend, Luke, in Manhattan’s West Village. But with her best friend, Suze, engaged, how can Becky fail to notice that her own ring finger is bare? Not that she’s been thinking about marriage (or diamonds) or anything. Then Luke proposes! Problem is, two other people are planning her wedding: Becky’s overjoyed mother—who has been waiting forever to host a backyard wedding, with the bride resplendent in Mum’s frilly old gown; and her high-society soon-to-be mother-in-law—who insists on a glamorous, all-expenses-paid affair at the Plaza. Both weddings, on separate continents, on the same day . . . and Becky can’t seem to turn down either one. Can everyone’s favorite shopaholic tie the knot before everything unravels? Praise for Sophie Kinsella and Shopaholic Ties the Knot “Kinsella has a genuine gift for comic writing.”—The Boston Globe “Witty and hilarious.”—Cosmopolitan (U.K.) “Another entertaining entry in Kinsella’s unabashedly fluffy Shopaholic series . . . chock-full of the charming antics and asides that made the first two installments hilarious best-sellers.”—Booklist “Kinsella’s Bloomwood is plucky and funny. . . . You won’t have to shop around to find a more winning protagonist.”—People