Plenty of Good Books in this List
Discover a curated list of must-read books in this comprehensive collection. Find your next favorite read among plenty of great titles for every taste and interest.
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The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
This limited edition volume includes art work painted by the author. This is the story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and falls in love with Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course.
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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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Bleachers
by John Grisham
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • High school all-American Neely Crenshaw was probably the best quarterback ever to play for the legendary Messina Spartans. Fifteen years have gone by since those glory days, and Neely has come home to Messina to bury Coach Eddie Rake, the man who molded the Spartans into an unbeatable football dynasty. Now, as Coach Rake’s “boys” sit in the bleachers waiting for the dimming field lights to signal his passing, they replay the old games, relive the old glories, and try to decide once and for all whether they love Eddie Rake – or hate him. For Neely Crenshaw, a man who must finally forgive his coach – and himself – before he can get on with his life, the stakes are especially high. Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!
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History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.
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The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd
After her "stand-in mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters.
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Joe College
by Tom Perrotta
For many college students, Spring Break means fun and sun in Florida. For Danny, a Yale junior, it means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck, which plies the parking lots of office parks in central New Jersey. But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try and make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently dropped bombshell to contend with. And there's also lissome Polly back in New Haven--with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor. If girl problems aren't enough, there's the constant menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thugs who think Danny has planted the Roach Coach in their territory. Joe College is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funniest fiction yet, a comic journey into the dark side of love, higher education and food service.
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Desperation Moon
by Ken Douglas
When racecar driver Sara Hackett arrives home from a desert road race, she finds her niece and another girl have been kidnapped and a dead man has turned up in her bed. The kidnappers want a million dollars she doesn't have or they say they'll kill the kids.
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Good Grief
by Lolly Winston
Thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton desperately wants to be a good widow-a graceful, composed, Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, she is more of the Jack Daniels kind. Self-medicating with ice cream for breakfast, breaking down at the supermarket, and showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers-soon she's not only lost her husband, but her job, house...and waistline. With humor and chutzpah Sophie leaves town, determined to reinvent her life. But starting over has its hurdles; soon she's involved with a thirteen-year-old who has a fascination with fire, and a handsome actor who inspires a range of feelings she can't cope with-yet.
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Happiness Sold Separately
by Lolly Winston
"The marriage of a seemingly perfect couple dissolves into a complicated dance of affairs, lovers, and admirers"--Provided by the publisher.
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
A #1 New York Times bestseller by Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a brilliantly crafted novel of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love Kim Edwards’s stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964 in Lexington, Kentucky, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century—in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that winter night long ago. A family drama, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter explores every mother's silent fear: What would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? It is also an astonishing tale of love and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets are finally uncovered.
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Thirteen Moons
by Charles Frazier
Brilliantly imagined and written with great power and beauty by the author of "Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons" is a stunning novel about a mans passion for a woman, and how loss, longing, and love can shape a mans destiny over the many moons of a life.
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The Teahouse Fire
by Ellis Avery
This sweeping debut novel drawn from a history shrouded in secrets follows two women--one American, one Japanese--whose fates become entwined in the rapidly changing world of late-19th-century Japan.
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My Sister's Keeper
by Jodi Picoult
Written with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity, this novel is about a teen who was conceived as a bone marrow match for her sister Kate, and what happens when she begins to question who she really is.
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Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.
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The Whole World Over
by Julia Glass
From the author of the beloved novel "Three Junes" comes a rich and commanding story about the accidents, both grand and small, that determine our choices in love and marriage. Greenie Duquette, openhearted yet stubborn, devotes most of her passionate attention to her Greenwich Village bakery and her four- year- old son, George. Her husband, Alan, seems to have fallen into a midlife depression, while Walter, a traditional gay man who has become her closest professional ally, is nursing a broken heart. It is at Walter' s restaurant that the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes Greenie' s coconut cake and decides to woo her away from the city to be his chef. For reasons both ambitious and desperate, she accepts-- and finds herself heading west without her husband. This impulsive decision will change the course of several lives within and beyond Greenie' s orbit. Alan, alone in New York, must face down his demons; Walter, eager for platonic distraction, takes in his teenage nephew. Yet Walter cannot steer clear of love trouble, and despite his enforced solitude, Alan is still surrounded by women: his powerful sister, an old flame, and an animal lover named Saga, who grapples with demons all her own. As for Greenie, living in the shadow of a charismatic politician leads to a series of unforeseen consequences that separate her from her only child. We watch as folly, chance, and determination pull all these lives together and apart over a year that culminates in the fall of the twin towers at the World Trade Center, an event that will affirm or confound the choices each character has made-- or has refused to face. Julia Glass is at her besthere, weaving a glorious tapestry of lives and lifetimes, of places and people, revealing the subtle mechanisms behind our most important, and often most fragile, connections to others. In "The Whole World Over" she has given us another tale that pays tribute to the extraordinary complexities of love.
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Ines of My Soul
by Isabel Allende
Born into a poor family in Spain, Inés, a seamstress, finds herself condemned to a life of hard work without reward or hope for the future. It is the sixteenth century, the beginning of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and when her shiftless husband disappears to the New World, Inés uses the opportunity to search for him as an excuse to flee her stifling homeland and seek adventure. After her treacherous journey takes her to Peru, she learns that her husband has died in battle. Soon she begins a fiery love affair with a man who will change the course of her life: Pedro de Valdivia, war hero and field marshal to the famed Francisco Pizarro. Valdivia's dream is to succeed where other Spaniards have failed: to become the conquerer of Chile. The natives of Chile are fearsome warriors, and the land is rumored to be barren of gold, but this suits Valdivia, who seeks only honor and glory. Together the lovers Inés Suárez and Pedro de Valdivia will build the new city of Santiago, and they will wage a bloody, ruthless war against the indigenous Chileans—the fierce local Indians led by the chief Michimalonko, and the even fiercer Mapuche from the south. The horrific struggle will change them forever, pulling each of them toward their separate destinies. Inés of My Soul is a work of breathtaking scope: meticulously researched, it engagingly dramatizes the known events of Inés Suárez's life, crafting them into a novel full of the narrative brilliance and passion readers have come to expect from Isabel Allende.
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The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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Rise and Shine
by Anna Quindlen
Life will never be the same for Meghan, the star of Rise and shine, after she mutters words of profanity into the open mike, as they cut for a commercial break.
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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.
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The Choice
by Nicholas Sparks
Resisting romantic commitments while enjoying a life of boating, swimming, and barbecues, Travis Parker is unable to deny his attraction to new next-door neighbor Gabby Holland, a defensive woman whose long-time boyfriend further challenges Travis's growing feelings. By the author of The Notebook.
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Ghostwalk
by Rebecca Stott
When the death of a Cambridge historian leaves her opus on Sir Isaac Newton unfinished, Lydia Brooke is called in to finish the book, only to find herself embroiled in a mystery in which the present becomes entangled with a past based on Newton's life.
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The God of Animals
by Aryn Kyle
Based on the author's short story titled "The Foaling Season," the tale of rancher's daughter Alice Winston finds her helping to support the family business by boarding the horses of rich neighbors and leaving behind the innocence of her youth.
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Mergers & Acquisitions
by Dana Vachon
Having landed his dream job as an investment banker as well as a girlfriend from a wealthy family, recent graduate Tommy Quinn enjoys a privileged life of exclusive clubs, elite boardrooms, and luxury yachts, but finds that things are not as wonderful as he thought they would be.
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Then We Came to the End
by Joshua Ferris
This wickedly funny, big-hearted novel about life in the office signals the arrival of a gloriously talented new writer. The characters in Then We Came to the End cope with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, secret romance, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. By day they compete for the best office furniture left behind and try to make sense of the mysterious pro-bono ad campaign that is their only remaining "work."
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For One More Day
by Mitch Albom
This is the story of Charley, a child of divorce who is always forced to choose between his mother and his father. He grows into a man and starts a family of his own. But one fateful weekend, he leaves his mother to secretly be with his father - and she dies while he is gone. This haunts him for years. It unravels his own young family. It leads him to depression and drunkenness. One night, he decides to take his life. But somewhere between this world and the next, he encounters his mother again, in their hometown, and gets to spend one last day with her - the day he missed and always wished he'd had. He asks the questions many of us yearn to ask, the questions we never ask while our parents are alive. By the end of this magical day, Charley discovers how little he really knew about his mother, the secret of how her love saved their family, and how deeply he wants the second chance to save his own.
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The Raw Shark Texts
by Steven Hall
Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn't recognise, unable to remember who he is. Attacked by a force he cannot see and confronted with memories he cannot ignore, Eric discovers he is being hunted by a psychic predator, a shark. This creature may exist only in his mind, but it soon starts making some very real appearances in his world. Loaded with letters from his past self, each signed 'With regret and also hope, The First Eric Sanderson', Eric embarks on a quest to recover his life. A love story, an adventure, a psychological drama - this wild, touching, modern tale is cut through with an understated humour and warmth. The depths of love, language, memory and the inevitability of loss have never been plumbed with such deep-hearted imagination.
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We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver
The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin’s horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
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Heyday
by Kurt Andersen
Englishman Benjamin Knowles heads for America to build a new life and joins up with three young Americans--journalist Timothy Skaggs, war veteran Duff Lucking, and Duff's actress sister, Polly--to seek their fortunes in the gold fields of California.
