Favorite Fiction Ive Read Recently
Discover my top favorite fiction books recently read—captivating stories, must-read novels, and unforgettable characters. Find your next great read here!
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Camilla
by Madeleine L'Engle
Experience this story of first love by A Wrinkle in Time author Madeleine L'Engle. This classic novel is now a major motion picture, Camilla Dickinson. Fifteen-year-old Camilla Dickinson has led a sheltered life on the Upper East Side with her architect father and stunningly beautiful mother. But this winter the security she has always known has vanished, because her parents' marriage is coming apart - and Camilla is caught in the middle. She finds a way to escape her troubles when she meets Frank, her best friend's brother, who is someone she can really talk to about life, death, God, and her dream of becoming an astronomer. When Frank introduces her to the important people in his life, who are so different from anyone she has met before, he opens her eyes to worlds beyond her own, almost as if he were a telescope helping her to see the stars. This novel, one of the author's earliest, is the story of a girl who, with the help of her first love, leaves childhood behind and enters adulthood with a newfound sense of self and inner strength. Books by Madeleine L'Engle A Wrinkle in Time Quintet A Wrinkle in Time A Wind in the Door A Swiftly Tilting Planet Many Waters An Acceptable Time A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel by Madeleine L'Engle; adapted & illustrated by Hope Larson Intergalactic P.S. 3 by Madeleine L'Engle; illustrated by Hope Larson: A standalone story set in the world of A Wrinkle in Time. The Austin Family Chronicles Meet the Austins (Volume 1) The Moon by Night (Volume 2) The Young Unicorns (Volume 3) A Ring of Endless Light (Volume 4) A Newbery Honor book! Troubling a Star (Volume 5) The Polly O'Keefe books The Arm of the Starfish Dragons in the Waters A House Like a Lotus And Both Were Young Camilla The Joys of Love
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Scar Tissue
by Michael Ignatieff
At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into neurological illness are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of familial loyalty. A philosophy professor watches helplessly as his mother sinks into the mysterious depths of an unknown illness. His efforts to understand her gradual deterioration - from innocently misplaced eyeglasses and endlessly repeated anecdotes to a total loss of identity - lead him to reach out to his estranged brother, a neurologist, to learn all he can of the disease. Yet medical science is as powerless as philosophy to help them comprehend what is happening to her and to them, to explain the relation between brain and mind, between memory and selfhood, between heart and soul. The narrator, distrusting the usual explanations for his mother's tragedy, begins, dangerously, to lose his own bearings, as he senses how deeply his family - and life - have been transformed. Yet Scar Tissue affirms the power of true understanding, and at the end: "The owl is calling from the trees. Its hunt is about to begin. The moon hovers over the city and white light streams across the ivied floor of the park. I feel life calling me from this desk. I feel it bid me rise and walk out..".
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The Vicar of Sorrows
by A. N. Wilson
In this powerful novel that will confirm his reputation as one of Britain's brightest literary lights, A.N. Wilson recounts the downward spiral of Francis Kreer, a clergyman who has stopped believing in God and whose marriage has begun to come apart at the seams. When his mother dies, Francis is shocked to discover that she had a lover and that he must share his inheritance with this odious man. Then Francis falls in love--painfully, absolutely--with an irresistible but most unsuitable young woman. Wilson traces Francis's descent through various circles of the English establishment and counterculture, a tragi-comic journey that takes the hero to the outer edges of both absurdity and despair.
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Love in the Ruins
by Walker Percy
Amid the decadence and polarization of a future American society, a U.S. doctor discovers a promising cure for all the ills of the human psyche.
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Father Melancholy's Daughter
by Gail Godwin
The novels of Gail Godwin are contemporary classics--evocative, powerfully affecting, beautifully crafted fiction alive with endearing, unforgettable characters. Her critically acclaimed work has placed her among the ranks of Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy, and Carson McCullers, firmly establishing Godwin as a Southern literary novelist for the ages. Father Melancholy's Daughter, is widely recognized as one of the author's most poignant and accomplished novels -- a bittersweet and ultimately transcendent story of a young girl's devotion to her father, the rector of a small Virginia church, and of the hope, dreams, and love that sustain them both in the wake of the betrayal and tragedy that diminished their family.
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Evensong
by Gail Godwin
To read Gail Godwin is to touch the very core of human experience. With inimitable grace and aching emotional precision, Godwin probes our own complexities in characters whose lives oscillate between success and struggle, stoic resolve and quixotic temptation, bitter disappointment and small, sacred joys. Now with Evensong, she again translates our everyday existence into soul-touching truths as she brings to brilliantly realized life the people of a small Smoky Mountain town--and a woman whose world is indelibly altered by them.
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Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
In 1956, toward the end of his life, Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, sharing the story of his life and explaining how his faith influenced his choices and actions.
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Home
by Marilynne Robinson
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Gilead" pens a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations.
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Shikasta
by Doris Lessing
The first volume in the Canopus in Argos: Archives series is resented as a compilation of documents, reports, letters, speeches and journal entries, and purports to be a general study of the planet Shikasta–clearly the planet Earth–to be used by history students of the higher planet Canopus and to be stored in the Canopian archives. For eons, galactic empires have struggled against one another, and Shikasta is one of the main battlegrounds. Johar, an emissary from Canopus and the primary contributor to the archives, visits Shikasta over the millennia from the time of the giants and the biblical great flood up to the present. With every visit he tries to distract Shikastans from the evil influences of the planet Shammat but notes with dismay the ever-growing chaos and destruction of Shikasta as its people hurl themselves towards World War III and annihilation.
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City of God
by E. L. Doctorow
Beginning in mystery--the theft of a large brass cross from St. Timothy's Episcopal Church and its reappearance on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism--this mordantly funny bestseller by the author of "Billy Bathgate" and "The Waterworks" emerges as a narrative of the 20th century written for the 21st. "Dazzling . . . heartbreaking, and superb".--"The Miami Herald".
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The Heartbreaker
by Susan Howatch
Deftly combining the sacred and the profane—the unmistakable hallmark of her fiction over the past decade—Susan Howatch gives us a spellbinding, suspenseful and psychologically intense new novel. The financial heart of London—the City—is an adrenaline-charged square mile deep in recession in the 1990s, a place where sex is just another commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace. And the City is where the life of Gavin Blake, who sells sex to high flyers, is finally about to unravel. In the center of the City is St. Benet’s, a church that ministers to the casualties of this affluent but amoral society. Carta Graham, the St. Benet’s fundraiser, is at once attracted to Gavin when they meet through a mutual friend, but slowly she realizes that she has entered a relationship far more complex than she could ever have imagined. Gavin is desperate to escape from his world of prostitution, pornography and violence, but as his involvement with Carta and St. Benet’s deepens, the dangers that encircle him escalate until his life itself is on the line. Carta is determined to help him—but will their mysterious journey together be lifesaving or soul-destroying? All she can do is fight her hardest to help Gavin survive. Consistently surprising and powerfully moving, The Heartbreaker is Susan Howatch’s most gripping novel yet.
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Unfinished Desires
by Gail Godwin
Sparking enthusiasm for a play about the founding of their North Carolina mountains Catholic girls' school, a charismatic ninth grader and her recently orphaned best friend set in motion a series of events that have decades-long ramifications. By a three-time National Book Award finalist. Reprint.
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Fabulous Small Jews
by Joseph Epstein
A collection of eighteen stories featuring a host of characters at various crossroads and turning points in their lives, covering such themes as identity, family love, and repressed impulses.
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Death with Interruptions
by José Saramago
What happens when Death becomes human and falls in love?
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Everyman
by Philip Roth
WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral and “our most accomplished novelist” (The New Yorker) turns his attention to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
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Nine Dragons
by Michael Connelly
After what seems like a routine murder investigation, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch finds himself in Hong Kong facing the highest-stakes case of his life: bringing his kidnapped daughter home. Harry Bosch is assigned a homicide call in South L.A. that takes him to Fortune Liquors, where the Chinese owner has been shot to death behind the counter in an apparent robbery. Joined by members of the department's Asian Crime Unit, Bosch relentlessly investigates the killing and soon identifies a suspect, a Los Angeles member of a Hong Kong triad. But before Harry can close in, he gets the word that his young daughter Maddie, who lives in Hong Kong with her mother, is missing. Bosch drops everything to journey across the Pacific to find his daughter. Could her disappearance and the case be connected? With the stakes of the investigation so high and so personal, Bosch is up against the clock in a new city, where nothing is at it seems.