More Excellent Fiction to Explore
Discover a curated collection of exceptional fiction, from literary masterpieces like *Brokeback Mountain* by Annie Proulx and *Girl with a Pearl Earring* by Tracy Chevalier to compelling modern classics including *The Memory Keeper's Daughter* and *The Poisonwood Bible*. Explore a diverse world of captivating stories, unforgettable characters, and award-winning authors in this handpicked reading list.
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Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier
Holland comes to dazzling life in this richly imagined portrait of Griet, a sixteen year old of the 1660s who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings.
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Inheritance: A Novel
by Lan Samantha Chang
In 1931 China, two young sisters, abandoned after their mother's suicide, promise never to leave each other. Set against the backdrop of political chaos and social upheaval, the story traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust.
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All the Stars Came Out that Night
by Kevin King
In the tradition of iconic literary baseball novels such as The Natural, Bang the Drum Slowly, and The Brothers Kcomes a mythic tale about 1930s stars Dizzy Dean, Satchel Paige, and the greatest game ever played.Narrated by gossip columnist Walter Winchell, All the Stars Came Out That Nightpaints a vivid and moving portrait of Depression-era baseball'its raw joy and elegance but also its cursing, boozing, womanizing, and racism, and its odd relationships with bootleggers, racketeers, Hollywood stars, kidnappers, and even Dominican dictators. The date was October 20, 1934, just days after Diz's Cardinals won the World Series. The place was Boston's Fenway Park, under portable lights. The money behind it was Henry Ford's, who yearned to see an all-white (and non-Jewish) team defeat the black all-stars. And the force behind it all was Clarence Darrow, the legal genius who pulled the political levers to make it happen. For Diz's team there was Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Shoeless Joe Jackson (overweight and still banned from the game), and a lanky minor- leaguer named Joe DiMaggio. Paige's all-stars featured Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell (the fastest man from first to third), Turkey Stearnes, and Buck Leonard. With a gimlet eye for historical detail and a passionate love for the game, Kevin King chronicles this epic game between Diz's and Satch's all-stars'and the epic struggle to put it together. No trophies or championships were on the line, only the two most important things in life to any ballplayer'respect and redemption.
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Tangerine Dream
by Ken Douglas
Best friends Haley and Taylor must deal with a terrible loss when Taylor's twin sister, Dylan, is killed in a car crash. Meanwhile, Taylor and Dylan's father, a senator running for president and supposedly somewhere on the campaign trail, can't be reached because he is in the arms of a prostitute. While the girls and the twins' mother try to recover and avoid the press in New Zealand, Nick Nesbitt, a television news reporter, senses a story and will stop at nothing to get it.
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Brokeback Mountain
by Annie Proulx
The friendship between Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys, evolves into an intimate relationship while they are working together as a herder and camp tender, sharing a bond that spans many years and frequent separations.
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The Highest Tide
by Jim Lynch
A mesmerizing, allegorical, and beautifully wrought first novel about one boy’s fascination with the sea during the summer that will change his life. One moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley slips out of his house, packs up his kayak and goes exploring on the flats of Puget Sound. But what begins as an ordinary hunt for starfish, snails, and clams is soon transformed by an astonishing sight: a beached giant squid. As the first person to ever see a giant squid alive, the speed-reading Rachel Carson-obsessed insomniac instantly becomes a local curiosity. When he later finds a rare deepwater fish in the tidal waters by his home, and saves a dog from drowning, he is hailed as a prophet. The media hovers and everyone wants to hear what Miles has to say. But Miles is really just a teenager on the verge of growing up, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his bickering parents will divorce, and fearful that everything, even the bay he loves, is shifting away from him. While the sea continues to offer up discoveries from its mysterious depths, Miles struggles to deal with the difficulties that attend the equally mysterious process of growing up. In this mesmerizing, beautifully wrought first novel, we witness the dramatic sea change for both Miles and the coastline that he adores over the course of a summer—one that will culminate with the highest tide in fifty years.
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twin daughter during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from the baby's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child. A first novel. 40,000 first printing.
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The Starter Wife
by Gigi Levangie Grazer
When Gracie's husband unceremoniously dumps her (by cell phone) mere months before their ten-year anniversary and takes up with a famous pop starlet, she finds herself reeling.
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Sky Burial
by Xinran
The bestselling author of "Good Women of China" returns with an epic tale--based on a true story--of love, friendship, courage and sacrifice set in Chinese-occupied Tibet.
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A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
by Yiyun Li
In this collection of stories, the author illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate.
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The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives
by Sarah Strohmeyer
A tale of love and betrayal among the gated-in communities of American suburbia finds Ohio socialite Marti Denton realizing her passionate love for John Harding in the wake of his impulsive marriage to a socially awkward newspaper reporter.
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Hot Flash Holidays
by Nancy Thayer
When the Hot Flash friends gather at the spa to trim the Christmas tree, they share steaming mugs of hot chocolate, a few laughs, and a vow to make this holiday one to remember.
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The Art of Uncontrolled Flight
by Kim Ponders
A stunning literary debut about a woman – an airforce pilot – torn between duty and desire. The long shadow of a charismatic father leads Annie Shaw to decide, as far back as she can remember, to follow in his footsteps and become an air force pilot. Years later, after her mother's death and her own graduation from the academy, Captain A. Shaw is now one of the first female pilots in American history to engage in active combat duty during the first Gulf War. But her pride at earning rank as the only woman in an all–male fraternity offers little solace as the realities of battle change her, forever, into a wary, combat–wise survivor.
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Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill
The friendship between Alison, a young woman struggling with her ruined career as a fashion model, and Veronica, an older eccentric and proofreader, survives Alison's return to the world of fashion and Veronica's battle with AIDS.
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The Bad Behavior of Belle Cantrell
by Loraine Despres
Belle Cantrell goes to jail in 1920s Louisiana after swimming in her bloomers with a group of suffragettes, killing her husband of sixteen years, and engaging in other tumultuous activities that transform her home community.
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The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
Set against a background of political turbulence in Kerala, this is the story of twins Esthappen and Rahel who try to craft a childhood for themselves amongst the vats of banana jam and heaps of peppercorns in their grandmother's factory.
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Eventide
by Kent Haruf
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning, bestselling author of Plainsong returns to the high-plains town of Holt, Colorado, with a novel that unveils the immemorial truths about human beings: their fragility and resilience, their selfishness and goodness, and their ability to find family in one another. • "Storytelling at its best.” —Entertainment Weekly The aging McPheron brothers are learning to live without Victoria Roubideaux, the single mother they took in and who has now left their ranch to start college. A lonely young boy stoically cares for his grandfather while a disabled couple tries to protect their a violent relative. As these lives unfold and intersect, Eventide reveals Kent Haruf as a novelist of masterful authority. “Stunning.... The dry, cold air of Colorado's high plains seems to intensify the light Kent Haruf shines on every character in his masterful novel.... A book of hope, hope as plain and hard-won as Haruf's keenly styled prose.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
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Portrait in Sepia
by Isabel Allende
Lacking all memory of the first five years of her life because of a brutal trauma, Aurora del Valle is raised by her regal grandmother Paulina and eventually seeks to confront the mystery of her past, in a novel set in late-nineteenth-century Chile.
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Maybe a Miracle
by Brian Strause
Comic and heartbreaking, intimate and universal, familiar and extraordinary, Strause's captivating debut novel about a family in crisis takes readers on a miraculous emotional journey into America's heartland.
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Dead Ringer
by Ken Douglas
"Maggie Nesbitt is pregnant and depressed, because her husband isn't the father of her unborn child. She's thinking about abortion when she's attacked on the beach. She barely gets away, then gets the shock of her life the next morning when she sees that she has been killed on the news and that her nude body had been dumped in the trash behind a beachside bar. She finds out the body behind the bar is the twin sister she'd been told had died when she was two weeks old. She also learns her twin was divorced from a horrid man and that she had an eight-year-old daughter, Jasmine. Maggie, showing a bump on her head she got while getting away from her attackers, claims partial amnesia and steps into her dead twin's life. This way she can have her baby, give it a home, and save Jasmine from having to go and live with her father. But she doesn't know her twin saw someone do murder. And that someone thinks he's killed the wrong woman."--Publisher description
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A Feast for Crows
by George R. R. Martin
THE BOOK BEHIND THE FOURTH SEASON OF THE ACCLAIMED HBO SERIES GAME OF THRONES Few books have captivated the imagination and won the devotion and praise of readers and critics everywhere as has George R. R. Martin’s monumental epic cycle of high fantasy. Now, in A Feast for Crows, Martin delivers the long-awaited fourth book of his landmark series, as a kingdom torn asunder finds itself at last on the brink of peace . . . only to be launched on an even more terrifying course of destruction. A FEAST FOR CROWS It seems too good to be true. After centuries of bitter strife and fatal treachery, the seven powers dividing the land have decimated one another into an uneasy truce. Or so it appears. . . . With the death of the monstrous King Joffrey, Cersei is ruling as regent in King’s Landing. Robb Stark’s demise has broken the back of the Northern rebels, and his siblings are scattered throughout the kingdom like seeds on barren soil. Few legitimate claims to the once desperately sought Iron Throne still exist—or they are held in hands too weak or too distant to wield them effectively. The war, which raged out of control for so long, has burned itself out. But as in the aftermath of any climactic struggle, it is not long before the survivors, outlaws, renegades, and carrion eaters start to gather, picking over the bones of the dead and fighting for the spoils of the soon-to-be dead. Now in the Seven Kingdoms, as the human crows assemble over a banquet of ashes, daring new plots and dangerous new alliances are formed, while surprising faces—some familiar, others only just appearing—are seen emerging from an ominous twilight of past struggles and chaos to take up the challenges ahead. It is a time when the wise and the ambitious, the deceitful and the strong will acquire the skills, the power, and the magic to survive the stark and terrible times that lie before them. It is a time for nobles and commoners, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and sages to come together and stake their fortunes . . . and their lives. For at a feast for crows, many are the guests—but only a few are the survivors.
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The Jungle Law
by Victoria Vinton
Chronicles the 1892 arrival of a nearly penniless Rudyard Kipling and his pregnant young wife in Vermont, and his struggle to bring to life his story of a feral child raised by wild animals, a work that became "The Jungle Books."
