Books you might have missed, chosen by appreciative readers who enjoyed them.
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Superior Women
By Adams, Alice
1998/07 - Pocket Books
9780671020682 Find in the Library
"New York Times" bestselling author Alice Adams presents the compelling tale of five women who come of age during World War II, and flourish in the decades that follow.
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More Die of Heartbreak
By Bellow, Saul
Amis, Martin
2004/09 - Penguin Books
9780142437742 Find in the Library
Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of "More Die of Heartbreak," has left his native Paris for the Midwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, the world-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described plant visionary. While his studies take him around the world, Benn, a restless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings after his first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from bliss to breakdown. Imagining that a settled existence will end his anguish, Benn ties the knot again, opening the door to a flood of new torments. As Kenneth grapples with his own problems involving his unusual lady-friend Treckie, the two men try to figure out why gifted and intelligent people invariably find themselves knee-deep in the garbage of a personal life.
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The Tortilla Curtain
By Boyle, T. Coraghessan
1996/09 - Penguin Books
9780140238280 Find in the Library
From the author of The Road to Wellville comes his most controversial novel yet--a deeply moving story of the men and women who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American dream. "Succeeds in stealing the front page news and bringing it home to the great American tradition of the social novel".--The Boston Globe.
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The Power of One
By Courtenay, Bryce
2007/07 - Laurel-Leaf Books
9780440239130 Find in the Library
"Unabashedly uplifting."
THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
Set in a world torn apart, where man enslaves his fellow man and freedom remains elusive, THE POWER OF ONE is the moving story of one young man's search for the love that binds friends, the passion that binds lovers, and the realization that it takes only one to change the world. A weak and friendless boy growing up in South Africa during World War II, Peekay turns to two older men, one black and one white, to show him how to find the courage to dream, to succeed, to triumph over a world when all seems lost, and to inspire him to summon up the most irrersistible force of all: the Power of One.
"From the Paperback edition.
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Paris Trout
By Dexter, Pete
1989/08 - Penguin Books
9780140122060 Find in the Library
A respected white citizen of Cotton Point, Georgia, Paris Trout is a shopkeeper, a money-lender, and a murderer of blacks. And his friends, family and foes do not realize the danger they face in a man who simply will not see his own guilt.#Penguin.
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Dancing at the Rascal Fair
By Doig, Ivan
2006/05 - Scribner Book Company
9780684831053 Find in the Library
Ivan Doig's supple tale of land seekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill, walled apart by their obligations as they and their stormy kith and kin vie to tame the brutal, beautiful Two Medicine country. This is the central volume in Doig's acclaimed Montana series. National ads/media.
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Love Medicine
By Erdrich, Louise
2001/04 - Harper Perennial
9780060975548 Find in the Library
The first book in Erdrich's Native American tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace is an authentic and emotionally powerful glimpse into the Native American experience--now resequenced and expanded to include never-before-published chapters.
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Hotel Paradise
By Grimes, Martha
1996/04 - Alfred A. Knopf
9780679441878 Find in the Library
A neglected lake, covered with water lilies and rimmed by blowing grass. A once fashionable, now fading resort hotel. A derelict house full of secrets and dusty furnishings, uninhabited for almost half a century. The death-by-drowning of a twelve-year-old girl forty years in the past. And another twelve-year-old girl who grows increasingly obsessed with this death. With her knack for encouraging adults to reminisce, she begins to put together the pieces of a past and present puzzle. Hotel Paradise is a delicate yet excruciating view of the decisions a young girl must make on her way to becoming an adult and the choices she must make between right and wrong, between love and truth, between life and death.
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Dalva
By Harrison, Jim
1991/01 - Washington Square Press
9780671740672 Find in the Library
From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam -- and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.
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Plainsong
By Haruf, Kent
1999/09 - Alfred A. Knopf
9780375406188 Find in the Library
A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl -- her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house -- is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.
From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together -- their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully
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Floating in My Mother's Palm
By Hegi, Ursula
1998/07 - Touchstone Books
9780684854755 Find in the Library
Glowing with the beauty and trouble of unconventionality, with the quest to transcend human tragedy, "Floating in My Mother's Palm" presents "an absolutely correct postwar Germany with all its forbidden questions and mysterious behavior, all its squalor, loss, and longing" ("Los Angeles Times").
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At the Sign of the Naked Waiter
By Herrick, Amy
1994/01 - Penguin Books
9780140231892 Find in the Library
Combining a gift for language, an exuberant sense of humor, and a boundless imagination, Herrick's coming-of-age novel is unlike any other. Navigating the mysterious path from childhood to adulthood, Sarah encounters a naked, winged man, rivalrous ghosts, and gods disguised as beggars.
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Moon Tiger
By Lively, Penelope
1989/03 - Harper Perennial
9780060972004 Find in the Library
The last thoughts of a dying writer are captured in this intelligent novel byBooker Prize-winner Penelope Lively. The moving and poignant story of lifeas a writer, historian, and mother ends as a saga of unfufilled love. 20,000print.
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Tending to Virginia
By McCorkle, Jill
1997/10 - Ballantine Books
9780449912539 Find in the Library
'Exuberant . . . three generations of Southern women . . . (and) the ties that bind them'.--'The New York Times Book Review'. 'A profound picture of the legacies of families, one that will stay in the reader's mind'.--'The Memphis Commercial Appeal'.
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So Long, See You Tomorrow
By Maxwell, William F.
1996/01 - Vintage Books USA
9780679767206 Find in the Library
On an Illinois farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment the tenous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end. In telling their interconnected stories, American Book Award winner William delivers a masterfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past. "A small, perfect novel."--Washington Post Book World.
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Who Will Run the Frog Hospital
By Moore, Lorrie
2004/03 - Vintage Books USA
9781400033829 Find in the Library
The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York, where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the family station wagon, and drinking borrowed liquor from old mayonnaise jars. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help and then everything changes.
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In the Lake of the Woods
By O'Brien, Tim
1995/09 - Penguin Books
9780140250947 Find in the Library
The author of The Things They Carried offers a riveting novel of love and mystery. When long-hidden secrets about the atrocities he committed in Vietnam come to light, a candidate for the U.S. Senate retreats with his wife to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Within days of their arrival, his wife mysteriously vanishes into the watery wilderness.
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The Grass Dancer
By Power, Susan
1997/04 - Berkley Publishing Group
9780425159538 Find in the Library
From the lore of her people, the Sioux, Susan Power has forged a consummate work of the imagination. Set on a North Dakota reservation, "The Grass Dancer" creates a living mythology, spinning folk motifs into the fabric of reality, revealing how the actions of our ancestors can affect our contemporary lives.
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The Love Letter
By Schine, Cathleen
2007/04 - Picador USA
9780312426989 Find in the Library
The national bestseller from the author of "Rameau's Niece" and "Alice in Bed" is now available in paper. When an anonymous love letter arrives in Helen MacFarquhar's mail one summer morning, it sends her on an obsessive search for the answer to the question "How do you fall in love?"
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Paint the Wind
By Spellman, Cathy Cash
2000/12 - Backinprint.com
9780595161485 Find in the Library
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Fools of Fortune
By Trevor, William
Prose, Francine
2006/04 - Penguin Books
9780143039624 Find in the Library
To my mind Trevors best novel and a very fine one. Graham Greene
Penguin Classics is proud to welcome William TrevorIrelands answer to Chekhov ("The Boston Globe") and one of the best writers of our era ("The Washington Post")to our distinguished list of literary masters. In this award-winning novel, an informers body is found on the estate of a wealthy Irish family shortly after the First World War, and an appalling cycle of revenge is set in motion. Led by a zealous sergeant, the Black and Tans set fire to the family home, and only young Willie and his mother escape alive. Fatherless, Willie grows into manhood while his alcoholic mothers bitter resentment festers. And though he finds love, Willie is unable to leave the terrible injuries of the past behind.
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Written on the Body
By Winterson, Jeanette
1994/02 - Vintage Books USA
9780679744474 Find in the Library
The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. "At once a love story and a philosophical meditation."--New York Times Book Review.
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Green City in the Sun
By Wood, Barbara
2007/06 - Authors Choice Press
9780595433391 Find in the Library
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The Ginger Tree
By Wynd, Oswald
1990/09 - Harper Perennial
9780060973322 Find in the Library
A recent bestseller in England, this bittersweet story of love and betrayal set in the Far East will be a Masterpiece Theatre miniseries airing in October. In 1903 a 20-year-old Scots girl sails to China to marry a British attache, but soon horrifies the British community by having an affair with a young Japanese count. |
Book Covers and descriptions courtesy of Bookletters. |