Diverse Fiction
Explore our curated list of diverse fiction books, featuring stories from varied cultures, perspectives, and voices. Discover inclusive reads that celebrate representation and broaden your literary horizons.
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Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Moving into the attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy, politically connected Fedden family in 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest becomes caught up in the rising fortunes of this glamorous family and finds his own life forever altered by his association during the boom years of the 1980s. By the author of The Swimming-Pool Library. 30,000 first printing.
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Assassin
by Ted Bell
Hawke is beginning to piece his life back together when he receives word that someone is systematically murdering American diplomats and their families around the globe. On the trail of two killers, Hawke must call upon resources deep within himself to stop a terrorist attack with grave global implications.
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Shopaholic & Sister
by Sophie Kinsella
Returning to London after her ten-month honeymoon, Becky Bloomwood Brandon finds herself depressed by a lack of money, a search for a job, and her best friend Suze's new best friend, until she discovers that she has a long lost sister.
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The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
Here, in an astonishing debut by a gifted storyteller, is the magnificent saga of proud and passionate men and women and the turbulent times through which they suffer and triumph. They are the Truebas. And theirs is a world you will not want to leave, and one you will not forget. Esteban -- The patriarch, a volatile and proud man whose lust for land is legendary and who is haunted by his tyrannical passion for the wife he can never completely possess. Clara -- The matriarch, elusive and mysterious, who foretells family tragedy and shapes the fortunes of the house of the Truebas. Blanca -- Their daughter, soft-spoken yet rebellious, whose shocking love for the son of her father's foreman fuels Esteban's everlasting contempt... even as it produces the grandchild he adores. Alba -- The fruit of Blanca's forbidden love, a luminous bearty, a fiery and willful woman... the family's break with the past and link to the future.
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Dead Witch Walking
by Kim Harrison
All the creatures of the night gather in "the Hollows" of Cincinnati, to hide, to prowl, to party ... and to feed. Vampires rule the darkness in a predator-eat-predator world rife with dangers beyond imagining -- and it’s Rachel Morgan's job to keep that world civilized. A bounty hunter and witch with serious sex appeal and an attitude, she'll bring 'em back alive, dead ... or undead.
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Northern Lights
by Nora Roberts
Baltimore cop Nate Burke gives up his job after the death of his partner and accepts the position of chief of police in the small town of Lunacy, Alaska, where his newfound peace, and his relationship with Meg Galloway is threatened by a killer who struck years before Burke's arrival and is still walking the streets.
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The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown
Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and French cryptologist Sophie Neveu work to solve the murder of an elderly curator of the Louvre, a case which leads to clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci and a centuries-old secret society.
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High Country Fall
by Margaret Maron
"No one is more surprised than Judge Deborah Knott by her engagement to her childhood friend Dwight Bryant. Stressed out by the impending marriage, Deborah agrees to fill in for a vacationing judge in the hills of Cedar Gap. With its fresh mountain air and gorgeous fall foliage, it's the perfect place to clear her head ... until a local doctor is brutally murdered. Presiding over the probable cause case against the main suspect, Deborah decides the trial can proceed. But when a second person is killed, Deborah begins to look at this case-and her relationship with Dwight-with more critical eyes. And if she fails to notice the fast approaching darkness, she could end up as another corpse in the High Country fall"--Page 2 of cover.
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What to Keep
by Rachel Cline
Denny Roman at twelve: a midwestern girl with a clueless family, a bit part in the school play, a crush on the drama teacher, and concerns about frontal development. Her mother and father, divorced neuroscientists, are raising her with benign neglect. The family is virtually run by an agoraphobe named Maureen, who has a taxi fleet and a superorganized and compassionate method of managing other people’s lives, especially Denny’s. Denny Roman at twenty-six: jets home from Hollywood for the weekend and lands in the marital minefield of her mother and stepfather’s imminent relocation to New York. She has to pack up her childhood possessions in forty-eight hours before returning to L.A. for a big audition with Robert Altman. She’s supposed to be deciding what to keep, but she’s worried about what to wear. In a deranged moment, she kisses her stepfather. On the lips. Denny Roman at thirty-six: A playwright on the eve of her first Off-Broadway production and once again living within sparring distance of her mother, she comes home from rehearsal one afternoon and finds a thirteen-year- old boy on her doorstep: Luke, the son of Maureen and a Mauritanian refugee cabdriver. Bewildered by his mother’s recent death, Luke is looking for a place where he might fit. Will Denny keep him in New York? Will she get any help from Sean—an actor whose good looks may be all there is to him? Will she be reconciled with her mother at long last? What to Keeplooks into the lives of Denny Roman, her mother, her father, her stepfather, and her surrogate mother—all practicing variations on the theme “parent” but none of them quite done being children themselves. Bubbling with sly humor and psychological insight, their story holds out a refreshingly flexible and realistic model of what a good family—whether created by nature or chance or both—can consist of.
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Love and Honor
by Randall Wallace
Summoned by Benjamin Franklin to prevent the Russians from aiding the British in the Revolutionary War, Kieran Selkirk travels to Russia disguised as a British mercenary to offer his services in the Tsarina's fight against the Cossacks.
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Death in Venice
by Thomas Mann
Eight complex stories illustrative of the author's belief that "a story must tell itself," highlighted by the high art style of the famous title novella.
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The Great Divorce
by C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis takes us on a profound journey through both heaven and hell in this engaging allegorical tale. Using his extraordinary descriptive powers, Lewis introduces us to supernatural beings who will change the way we think about good and evil.
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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory. But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French. All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear. Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic, fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
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The Winds of Change
by Martha Grimes
The death of a girl found on a London street as well as the discovery of the body of a woman prompts Richard Jury to join forces with Plant and Macalvie, commander of the Devon and Cornwall police, to investigate a murder.