Favorite Authors Part 1
Discover a curated list of favorite authors and their must-read books in Part 1 of our series. Find your next literary inspiration from top-rated writers across genres.
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Wounded
by Amy Lane
Green: "If someone gives their life for you, it is because they can not bear to live in a world without you. This is a great gift and a terrible burden, and if you are going to live, you need to be grateful for the gift and prepared to bear the burden." Cory: "I do fearsome things, when I'm touching people who love me..." Cory fled the foothills to deal with the pain of losing Adrian, and Green watched her go. Separately, they could easily grieve themselves to death, but when an enemy brings them together, they find out what a great and terrible force love can be.
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Bound
by Amy Lane
Humans have the option of separation, divorce, and heartbreak-for Corinne Carol-Anne Kirkpatrick, sorceress and queen of the vampires, the choices are limited to love or death. Now that she is back at Green's hill and assuming her duties as leader, her life is, at best, complicated. Bracken and Nicky are rivalling for her affections, Green is gone taking care of his people, and a new supernatural enemy is threatening the sanctity of all she has come to love. Throw in a family reunion gone bad, a supernatural psychiatrist and a killer physics class, and Cory's life isn't just complex, it's psychotic. Cory needs to get her act and her identity together, and soon, because the enemy she and her lovers are facing is a nightmare that doesn't just kill people, it unmakes them. If she doesn't figure out who she is and what her place is on Green's hill, it's not just her life on the line. She knows from hard experience that the only thing worse than facing death is facing the death of someone she loves. Because loving people is easy-living with them is what takes the real work, and it's even harder if you're BOUND.
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Book
The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a writer and still remains hugely inspirational.” —Kevin Kwan, author of Crazy Rich Asians Amy Tan’s beloved, New York Times bestselling tale of mothers and daughters, now the focus of a new documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir on Netflix Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
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The Bonesetter's Daughter
by Amy Tan
““As compelling as Tan’s first bestseller, The Joy Luck Club. . . No one writes about mothers and daughters with more empathy than Amy Tan.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “[An] absorbing tale of the mother-daughter bond . . . this book sing[s] with emotion and insight.” –People Ruth Young and her widowed mother, LuLing, have always had a tumultuous relationship. Now, before she succumbs to forgetfulness, LuLing gives Ruth some of her writings, which reveal a side of LuLing that Ruth has never known. . . . In a remote mountain village where ghosts and tradition rule, LuLing grows up in the care of her mute Precious Auntie as the family endures a curse laid upon a relative known as the bonesetter. When headstrong LuLing rejects the marriage proposal of the coffinmaker, a shocking series of events are set in motion–all of which lead back to Ruth and LuLing in modern San Francisco. The truth that Ruth learns from her mother’s past will forever change her perception of family, love, and forgiveness. “A strong novel, filled with idiosyncratic, sympathetic characters; haunting images; historical complexity; significant contemporary themes; and suspenseful mystery.” –Los Angeles Times “For Tan, the true keeper of memory is language, and so the novel is layered with stories that have been written down–by mothers for their daughters, passing along secrets that cannot be said out loud but must not be forgotten.” –The New York Times Book Review “Tan at her best . . . rich and hauntingly forlorn . . . The writing is so exacting and unique in its detail.” –San Francisco Chronicle
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Saving Fish from Drowning
by Amy Tan
“A rollicking, adventure-filled story . . . packed [with] the human capacity for love.” –USA Today “A superbly executed, good-hearted farce that is part romance and part mystery . . . With Tan’s many talents on display, it’s her idiosyncratic wit and sly observations . . . that make this book pure pleasure.” –San Francisco Chronicle San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses along the famed Burma Road for eleven lucky friends. But after her mysterious death, Bibi watches aghast from her ghostly perch as the travelers veer off her itinerary and embark on a trail paved with cultural gaffes and tribal curses, Buddhist illusions and romantic desires. On Christmas morning, the tourists cruise across a misty lake and disappear. With picaresque characters and mesmerizing imagery, Saving Fish from Drowning gives us a voice as idiosyncratic, sharp, and affectionate as the mothers of The Joy Luck Club. Bibi is the observant eye of human nature–the witness of good intentions and bad outcomes, of desperate souls and those who wish to save them. In the end, Tan takes her readers to that place in their own heart where hope is found. “Amy Tan is among our great storytellers.” –The New York Times Book Review “Amy Tan has created an almost magical adventure that, page by page, becomes a metaphor for human relationships.” –Isabel Allende “With humor, ruthlessness, and wild imagination, Tan has reaped [a] fantastic tale of human longings and (of course) their consequences.” –Elle “A book that’s easy to read and hard to forget.” –Newsweek
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The Hundred Secret Senses
by Amy Tan
The story of two sisters, one brought up in the U.S., the other in China. The American sister is contemptuous of the other's belief in ghosts until events cause her to understand what they can do. A tale of two cultures by the author of The Kitchen God's Wife.
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The Kitchen God's Wife
by Amy Tan
"Remarkable...mesmerizing...compelling.... An entire world unfolds in Tolstoyan tide of event and detail....Give yourself over to the world Ms. Tan creates for you." —The New York Times Book Review Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949. The Kitchen God's Wife is "a beautiful book" (Los Angeles Times) from the bestselling author of novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and the memoir, Where the Past Begins.
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Dragonwyck
by Anya Seton
Longing for an adventure away from her farm duties, eighteen-year-old Miranda Wells accepts her distant cousin's invitation to spend time with him at his gothic Hudson River estate in 1844.
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Lord of the Fading Lands
by C. L. Wilson
With the charm and accessibility of a fairytale, C. L. Wilson tells the Cinderella romance of a simple woodcarver's daughter whose dreams come true when she is claimed as the truemate of a powerful fey lord and discovers passion and magic CA be dangerous bedfellows.
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Lady of Light and Shadows
by C. L. Wilson
As her own magical powers awaken along with the growing darkness covering the land, Elly must discover who her true father is and whether the man she is destined to love can accept her real identity, in this follow-up to "Lord of the Fading Lands." Original.
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King of Sword and Sky
by C. L. Wilson
Risking everything to protect his kingdom, the Fey King must help his truemate and new bride embrace her magical powers to save both the tairen and her soul.
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Queen of Song and Souls
by C. L. Wilson
As the Fey King and his bride finally complete their truemate bond, they must learn to trust each other completely and defeat their most powerful enemy if they are to discover hidden truths about their world.
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Twelve Monkeys
by Elizabeth Hand
"A nerve-shattering thriller, based on the Universal picture starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt. Based on the motion picture screenplay by David Peoples & Janet Peoples"--Cover.
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Winterlong
by Elizabeth Hand
In the ruins of a once great city, separated twin children are reunited and undertake a dangerous journey to participate in a blood ritual that will signal the end of human history. Reprint.
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Glimmering
by Elizabeth Hand
In the violence- and pollution-stricken world of 1999, HIV-positive publisher Jack Finnegan is drawn into the seductive web of Leonard Thorpe, who possesses a magical elixir that cures Jack and transforms his world
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Mortal Love
by Elizabeth Hand
In the Victorian Age, a mysterious and irresistible woman becomes entwined in the lives of several artists, both as a muse and as the object of all-consuming obsession. Radborne Comstock, one of the early twentieth century's most brilliant young painters, is helpless under her dangerous spell. In modern-day London, journalist Daniel Rowlands meets a beguiling woman who holds the secret to invaluable -- and lost -- Pre-Raphaelite paintings, while wealthy dilettante-actor Valentine Comstock is consumed by enigmatic visions. Swirling between eras and continents, Mortal Love is the intense tale of unforgettable characters caught in a whirlwind of art, love, and intrigue that will take your breath away.
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Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories
by Elizabeth Hand
Widely praised and widely read, Elizabeth Hand is regarded as one of America's leading literary fantasists. This new collection (an expansion of the limited-release Bibliomancy, which won the World Fantasy Award in 2005) showcases a wildly inventive author at the height of her powers. Included in this collection are "The Least Trumps," in which a lonely women reaches out to the world through symbols, tattooing, and the Tarot, and "Pavane for a Prince of the Air," where neo-pagan rituals bring a recently departed soul to something very different than eternal rest. Written in the author's characteristic poetic prose and rich with the details of traumatic lives that are luminously transformed, Saffron and Brimstone is a worthy addition to an outstanding career. * Elizabeth Hand's work has been selected as a Washington Post Notable Book and a New York Times Notable Book, and she has been awarded a Nebula Award and two World Fantasy Awards.
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The Darkest Kiss
by Gena Showalter
Anya, goddess of anarchy, has never known pleasure. Until Lucien, the incarnation of death, draws her like no other. When the merciless Lord of the Underworld is ordered by the gods to claim Anya himself, their uncontrollable attraction becomes an anguished pursuit. Original.
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