Top Fiction Reads of 2002
Discover the top fiction reads of 2002 with our curated list of must-read books. Explore bestsellers, award-winners, and hidden gems from this iconic year in literature.
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Zen Attitude
by Sujata Massey
2nd mystery featuring Japanese antiques dealer Rei Shimura. Follows the salaryman's wife.
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The Bride's Kimono
by Sujata Massey
Antiques dealer Rei Shimura has managed to snag one of the most lucrative and prestigious jobs of her career: a renowned museum in Washington, D.C., has invited her to exhibit her kimonos and give a lecture on them. Accompanied by a gaggle of Japanese office ladies bent on a week of shopping, Rei lands in the capital. But her big break could ultimately break her. Within hours one of the kimonos is stolen, and then Rei's passport is discovered in a shopping mall dumpster—on the dead body of one of the Japanese tourists. Trouble is only beginning, though, for now Rei's parents have arrived and so has her ex-boyfriend. To track down the kimono and unmask a killer, Rei's got to do some clever juggling, fast talking, and quick sleuthing, or this trip home could be her last.
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The Floating Girl
by Sujata Massey
Japanese-American writer Rei Shimura finally feels at home in Tokyo. Working on an article about the history of comic book art, her story turns when the creator of a comic book, which reveals the social milieu of pre-World War II Japan, is found dead. Rei finds herself floating through Japan's youth underground to get the story--and save her own skin. A Mystery Guild Selection.
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Saints and Villains
by Denise Giardina
In the charnel house that was Europe in the Second World War, there were few instances of shining moral courage, let along secular sainthood. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and Nazi resister was the exception. This emblematic figure risked his life--and finally lost it--through his participation in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler and topple his regime. Saints and Villains gives us this exemplary life in a sweeping narrative that is bold in conception and utterly convincing in its power of imaginative reconstruction.
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Fall On Your Knees
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives -- even destroy them. Set on stormy Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is an internationally acclaimed multigenerational saga that chronicles the lives of four unforgettable sisters. Theirs is a world filled with driving ambition, inescapable family bonds, and forbidden love. Compellingly written, by turns menacingly dark and hilariously funny, this is an epic tale of five generations of sin, guilt, and redemption.
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American Fuji
by Sara Backer
Mount Fuji is the backdrop in this story of Gaby Stanton, an American professor living in Japan, who helps Alex Thorn investigate the death of his son at Shizuyama University.
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Total Recall
by Sara Paretsky
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A spectacular mystery—complex, fast-paced yet ruminative, and imbued with the grim awareness, shared by all intelligent hard-boiled novels, that the past always catches up with us . . . a thrilling and even moving mystery.”—The Washington Post Book World V.I.’s journey begins with a national conference in downtown Chicago, where angry protesters are calling for the recovery of Holocaust assets. Replayed on the evening news is the scene of a slight man who has stood up at the conference to tell an astonishing story of a childhood shattered by the Holocaust — a story that has devastating consequences for V.I.’s cherished friend and mentor, Lotty Herschel. Lotty was a girl of nine when she emigrated from Austria to England, one of a group of children wrenched from their parents and saved from the Nazi terror just before the war broke out. Now stunningly—impossibly—it appears that someone from that long-lost past may have returned. With the help of a recovered-memory therapist, Paul Radbuka has recently learned his true identity. But is he who he claims to be? Or is he a cunning impostor who has usurped someone else’s history . . . a history Lotty has tried to forget for over fifty years? As a frightened V.I. watches her friend unravel, she sets out to help in the only way she can: by investigating Radbuka’s past. Already working on a difficult case for a poor family cheated of their life insurance, she tries to balance Lotty’s needs with her client’s, only to find that both are spiraling into a whirlpool of international crime that stretches from Switzerland and Germany to Chicago’s South Side. As the atrocities of the past reach out to engulf the living, V.I. struggles to decide whose memories of a terrible war she can trust, and moves closer to a chilling realization of the truth—a truth that almost destroys her oldest friend.
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Plain Truth
by Jodi Picoult
Ellie Hathaway decides to defend an unmarried Amish woman against the charge of the murder of her own child.
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Only in London
by Hanan al-Shaykh
Four strangers meet on a turbulent flight from Dubai to London: Amira, a canny Moroccan prostitute; Lamis, a 30-year old Iraqi divorcee; Nicholas, an English expert on Islamic art; and Samir, a Lebanese man who is delivering a monkey on a mission he doesn’t fully understand. Once safely on British soil, Lamis and Nicholas fall in love, Samir chases after blond British youths, and Amira reinvents herself as a princess, the better to lure clients at the best London hotels. Through the city and across cultural borders, Only in London wittily portrays the smells, sounds, and sights of London’s lively Arab neighorhoods, as well as the freedoms the city both offers and withholds from its immigrants.
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Murder on the Iditarod Trail
by Sue Henry
The winner of Alaska's world-famous Iditarod -- a grueling, eleven-hundred-mile dog sled race across a frigid Arctic wilderness---takes home a $250,000 purse. But this year, the prize is survival. Only the toughest and the most able come to compete in this annual torturous test of endurance, skill, and courage. Now, suddenly and inexplicably, the top Iditarod contestants are dying one by one in bizarre and gruesome ways. Jessie Arnold, Alaska's premier female "musher," fears she may be the next intended victim, but nothing is going to prevent her from aggressively pursuing the glory and the rewards that victory brings. Dedicated State Trooper Alex Jensen is determined to track down the murderer before more innocent blood stains the pristine Alaskan snow. But Jensen's hunt is leading him into the frozen heart of the perilous wild that Jessie Arnold knows so well -- a merciless place far from any vestige of civilization, where nature can kill as fast as a bullet...and only the Arctic night can hear your final screams.
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The Vine of Desire
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The beloved characters of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s bestselling novel Sister of My Heart are reunited in this powerful narrative that challenges the emotional bond between two lifelong friends, as the husband of one becomes dangerously attracted to the other. Anju and Sudha formed an astounding, almost psychic connection during their childhood in India. When Anju invites Sudha, a single mother in Calcutta, to come live with her and her husband, Sunil, in California, Sudha foolishly accepts, knowing full well that Sunil has long desired her. As Sunil’s attraction rises to the surface, the trio must struggle to make sense of the freedoms of America–and of the ties that bind them to India and to one another.
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Kissing the Virgin's Mouth
by Donna M. Gershten
Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vásquez -- wife, scoundrel, courtesan, mother -- is full of contradictions: she believes in love but is suspicious of men; she rejects religion but admires the Virgin Mary; she respects tradition while breaking all the rules. Here, in the Golden Zone of Teatán, Mexico, Magda tells her extraordinary life story -- from a poor Mexican barrio to American affluence, from wide-eyed childhood to worldly courtesan life, from full-blooded youth to oncoming blindness -- and bewitchingly imparts the hard-earned wisdom she has gained through the years.
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Jim and Louella's Homemade Heart-fix Remedy
by Bertice Berry
A sizzling, smart, and utterly engaging novel about sex, love, folklore, and family history from the author of Redemption Song and The Haunting of Hip Hop. With her characteristic sense of humor and a good dose of motherly wit, Bertice Berry spins the endearing tale of Jim and Louella Johnson, an elderly couple in a southern town who have settled into a marriage that has long lost its pizzazz. Louella, fed up with her lackluster love life, decides to contact her departed ancestors for some advice. Conjuring up her mother, grandmother, and aunt in a dream, she receives a delightful lesson in the art of reigniting the fires of love. Even more startling, the Johnsons discover they can help others rejuvenate their passions, heal their hearts, and mend their souls Written in language that is folksy yet eloquent, Jim and Louella's Homemade Heart-Fix Remedy is an uplifting and flat-out funny celebration of the connections between past and present, the importance of family, and the pleasures of the body and the heart.
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A Painted House
by John Grisham
Racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder are seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy in a 1950s Southern cotton-farming community
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The Chamber
by John Grisham
While the executioners prepare the gas chamber, while the protesters gather and the TV cameras wait. Adam has only days, hours, minutes to save his client.
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Feeling Sorry for Celia
by Jaclyn Moriarty
An epistolary novel uses letters written between teenage friends, refrigerator notes from a crazy mother, and epistles that express the narrator's own internal feelings of self-doubt to weave this bittersweet coming of age story.