Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
"'Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?' A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive...
Author
Series
Description
"In 1896 ... Sarah Orne Jewett published her finest work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, about a woman writer who retreats one summer to Dunnet Landing, a Maine seacoast town, to find seclusion to do her work. In the novel and stories collected here, Jewett explores the world of the lonely inhabitants of once-prosperous coastal towns, offering a detailed view of lives molded by the long Maine winters, by the surrounding rock-filled fields, and by...
5) The plot
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
"Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he's teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what's left of his self-respect; he hasn't written--let alone published--anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn't need Jake's help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast...
6) Siddhartha
Author
Lexile measure
1010L
Description
In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life -- the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom.
Author
Series
Thursday Murder Club novels volume 1
Description
"In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves The Thursday Murder Club. There's Red Ron, the infamous former socialist firebrand, still causing trouble; gentle Joyce, widowed, pining for another resident, but surely not as innocent as she seems; Ibrahim, a former therapist who understands the darker side of human nature; and Elizabeth? Well, no one...
8) Housekeeping
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death....
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Appears on these lists
Description
"A debut novel about an odd assortment of residents living in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest"--
The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck....
Author
Appears on these lists
Black History & Activism: Recommended Reading for MLK Day
Black History Month
Black History Month 2023
More Lists...
Black History Month
Black History Month 2023
More Lists...
Description
"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant comes a twisting story of love and deceit: an American man vanishes from a rural road in Vietnam and his girlfriend, an ER doctor trained in deductive reasoning, follows a path that leads her home to the very hospital where they first met. Alexis and Austen met on a Saturday night. Not in a bar, but instead in the emergency room where Alexis sutured a bullet wound in Austen's arm....
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America.
13) Moloka'i
Author
Description
"Young Rachel Kalama, growing up in idyllic Honolulu in the 1890s, is part of a big, loving Hawaiian family, and dreams of seeing the far-off lands that her father, a merchant seaman, often visits. But at the age of seven, Rachel and her dreams are shattered by the discovery that she has leprosy. Forcibly removed from her family, she is sent to Kalaupapa, the isolated leper colony on the island of Moloka'i. In her exile she finds a family of friends...
Author
Appears on these lists
Black History Month
Black History Month 2023
Book Discussion Sets - Fiction
NPL Staff Favorites for 2022
Black History Month 2023
Book Discussion Sets - Fiction
NPL Staff Favorites for 2022
Description
"The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and...
Author
Appears on these lists
Book Chat October 12: Octopus & Squid
DAML Staff Picks 2023
NYT - Audio Fiction
NYT - Hardcover Fiction
DAML Staff Picks 2023
NYT - Audio Fiction
NYT - Hardcover Fiction
Description
Staying busy has helped Tova cope ever since her son disappeared decades ago. So when her husband dies, she takes a job at the aquarium, where she meets Marcellus, an octopus that deduces what happened to her son.
For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began...
Author
Description
"In her mesmerizing fourth work of fiction, Sue Monk Kidd takes an audacious approach to history and brings her acclaimed narrative gifts to imagine the story of a young woman named Ana. Raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, she is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. She engages in her furtive scholarly pursuits and writes narratives about neglected and silenced women. Ana is expected to marry...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"This is how a family keeps a secret ... and how that secret ends up keeping them. This is how a family lives happily ever after ... until happily ever after becomes complicated. This is how children change ... and then change the world. When Rosie and Penn and their four boys welcome the newest member of their family, no one is surprised it's another baby boy. At least their large, loving, chaotic family knows what to expect. But Claude is not like...
Author
Series
Description
This novel of awesome beauty and power is a moving saga about people, relationships, and the boundaries of love. Through Jean M. Auel's magnificent storytelling we are taken back to the dawn of modern humans, and with a girl named Ayla we are swept up in the harsh and beautiful Ice Age world they shared with the ones who called themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear. A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous...
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Appears on these lists
Description
"These twelve telltale, connected, deeply personal essays explore, up close, the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities, of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in New England today. The storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's...
20) American wife
Author
Description
On what might become one of the most significant days in her husband's presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led her to the White House--and the repercussions of a life lived, as she puts it, "almost in opposition to itself." How can she both love and fundamentally disagree with her husband? How complicit has she been in the trajectory of her own life? What should she do when her private beliefs run against her...
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