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Author
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This 1896 novel, first published serially in the Illustrated London News, is a murder mystery with a twist—the callous crime goes unpunished, though not undiscovered. James is less interested in a game of cat-and-mouse than in exploring the psychological motivations of his characters.
2) Empire falls
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Miles Roby, called back from college to the small town of Empire Falls in Dexter County, Maine to take care of his ailing mother, falls into a rut that keeps him trapped until years later when a series of revelations and tragedies jolts him back into an awareness of his life.
Author
Description
"Wise and funny . . . [A] near-perfect collection."
-Entertainment Weekly
Rebecca Lee, one of our most gifted and original short story writers, guides readers into a range of landscapes, both foreign and domestic, crafting stories as rich as novels. A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution...
Author
Description
On July 4, 1955, in rural Georgia, an act of violence threatens the life of Vidalia Lee Kandal Jackson’s pre-born daughter. Despite the direst of circumstances, the spirit of the lost child refuses to leave her ill-equipped young mother's side.
For as long as she is needed―through troubled pregnancies, through poverty, through spousal abuse and agonizing betrayals―Cieli Mae, the determined spirit child, narrates their journey. Serving as a...
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Series
Description
"Pass Christian, Mississippi, 1980: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips up the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from a Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot's flight bag, the plane's black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that...
Author
Series
Description
Peter Strand is half Chinese and half Cherokee and was adopted by an elderly white couple from Phoenix. Now he's a forensic accountant in San Francisco, where he's struggling with his identity. When his employer asks him to investigate a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, Strand meets a cast of quirky characters who all seem to be hiding a secret. Peter soon finds evidence of a probable fraud, but when fraud leads to murder, he's drawn deeper...
8) Americanah
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"Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in...
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"First published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables is one of Hawthorne's defining works, a vivid depiction of American life and values, replete with brilliantly etched characters. The tale of a cursed house with a "mysterious and terrible past" and the generations linked to it, Hawthorne's chronicle of the Maule and Pyncheon families over two centuries reveals, in Mary Oliver's words, "lives caught in the common fire of history.""--BOOK JACKET....
Author
Description
"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...
11) The bluest eye
Author
Series
Appears on these lists
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The story of Pecola Breedlove profiles an eleven-year-old Black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes and the tragedy that results from her longing to be accepted.
Author
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Kingdom County, Vermont, is tucked between the Green Mountains and the White Mountains not far from the Canadian border, a small town of proud people with long memories. When the new preacher, Walter Andrews, came to town, he was an outsider, a stranger. He was also a black man. It was the summer James Kinneson turned thirteen. Son of the newspaper owner and younger brother of the town's fiery defense lawyer, James witnessed the shattering events...
Author
Pub. Date
2004
Appears on list
Description
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial...
Author
Description
Eighty-two-year-old Marina Buriakov, preparing for her granddaughter's wedding in Seattle, finds it more and more difficult to hold onto memories in the present, retreating often to the 1940s when, living in the basement of the Hermitage Museum with other employees during the German siege of Leningrad, she created a memory room in her mind furnished with the museum's priceless masterpieces.
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"In this moving debut novel, two estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother's death and her hidden past--a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California and ends with her famous black cake. In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett's death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake, made from a family recipe with...
16) The red garden
Author
Description
A young wounded civil war solider is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet falls in love with a blind man, and a mysterious traveler comes to town in the year when summer never arrives. At the center of everyone's life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.
Author
Series
Oregon Trail volume 8
Description
In this choose-your-own-trail experience, you're traveling all the way from Florida, heading West to the Oregon Trail. See if you can make it to Oregon City! It's 1845 and your family is fleeing Florida with hopes of starting fresh out west. You'll encounter sudden snowstorms that will overwhelm your wagon train en route to the Oregon Trail. Food will become scarce--and you'll get lost. Can you survive the unseasonably cold climates? If you make the...
18) Gold rush!
Author
Series
Oregon Trail volume 7
Description
You're in the middle of the Gold Rush, pioneer-and you are headed West on the Oregon Trail with hopes to strike it rich in this choose-your-own-trail experience. Travel in your large wagon train and decide whether you'll stay the course to Oregon or take The California Trail towards Sacramento. Do your choices lead to a fortune-filled future or will they lead you straight into danger? Westward ho!
20) Linden Hills
Author
Description
The National Book Award–winning author of The Women of Brewster Place explores the secrets of an affluent black community. For its wealthy African American residents, the exclusive neighborhood of Linden Hills is a symbol of "making it." The ultimate achievement: a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive. Making your way downhill to Tupelo is irrefutable proof of your worth. But the farther down the hill you go, the emptier you become...Using the descent...
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