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Susie Salmon is speaking to us from heaven. It looks a lot like her school playground. There are counsellors to help newcomers adjust, and friends to room with. Everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it except the thing she wants most: to be back with the people she loved. From heaven, Susie watches her happy suburban family implode after her death, as they try to come to terms with their grief. Over the years, her friends and siblings...
Author
Description
The Dunnes have set off on a ten day boat trip, a trip that hopefully will bring them closer together, despite the fact that the father, Stuart is staying behind on land. But only an hour into the trip they're already falling apart. The teenage daughter plans to drown herself, and the teenage boy is high on drugs. Ten-year-old Ernie is near catatonic. But their mother Anne, with the help of her brother-in-law Jeff, is insistent on pulling everyone...
Author
Series
Lexile measure
870L
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Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, grows up in "his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother" and with his friend Guitar who is connected to the secret avengers called the Seven Days, falls in love with his cousin Hagar, learns from bootlegging Aunt Pilate, and then heads south, lured by the promise of buried gold and the mysteries of his heritage.
Author
Series
Description
Eugene Gant, born in 1900 to hard-drinking stone-cutter
Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, grows up in small-town
America. Both lonely outsider and passionate chronicler of
American life, Eugene experiences upheaval and family
tragedy before coming to realise that he must leave his
home behind if he is to forge his own path in the world.
This is the dazzlingly rich first novel from one of the
most...
Author
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Description
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn't fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer. Late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan's house,...
7) Persuasion
Author
Series
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Book Chat August 3: Balloons & Beer & Tea
Book Chat October 19: Department Stores and Navy Birthday
Romance
Book Chat October 19: Department Stores and Navy Birthday
Romance
Description
Anne Elliot lives at Kellynch Hall with her family, but when financial struggles set in they decide to move. Then her life is forever changed as she is reunited with Wentworth, a past fiancé who she never married. Through her journey, Anne may find that what she has been looking for was right in front of her the whole time.
Author
Description
Presents a story inspired by human love, how people take care of one another, and how choices resonate through subsequent generations. Afghanistan, 1952. Abdullah and his sister Pari live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pari, as beautiful and sweet-natured as the fairy for which she was...
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Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in...
Author
Description
The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women. Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, forced at age 15 into marrying the 40-year-old Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal as she fails to produce a child. Eighteen years later, Rasheed takes another wife, 14-year-old Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after her parents are killed...
Author
Series
Christmas box trilogy volume 1
Description
An inspirational Christian tale on a dying woman who convinces a busy shopkeeper in Utah to devote more time to his family because their love is God's greatest gift. This is the hardcover edition of a paperback self-published last year.
Author
Series
Description
"Barnes & Noble Classics "pulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. Left penniless by the death of his improvident father, young Nicholas Nickleby assumes responsibility for his mother and sister and seeks help from his Scrooge-like Uncle Ralph. Instantly disliking Nicholas, Ralph sends him to teach in a school run by the stupidly sadistic Wackford...
13) Freedom
Author
Description
The story of Patty and Walter Berglund, a young, Midwestern couple, who start their promising life together with good intentions, wanting to be good partners, good parents, good neighbors, and good citizens. As time passes, however, the family they create loses its way, and the choices they make carry them into a future so at odds with the past that the differences seem irreconcilable. The idyllic lives of these civic-minded environmentalists come...
14) Like water for chocolate: a novel in monthly installments, with recipes, romances, and home remedies
Author
Series
Like water for chocolate volume 1
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Description
With more than two million copies in print, this beloved novel has become a treasured part of America's literary memory. Now, for the first time, this "tall-tale, fairy-tale, soap opera romance, Mexican cookbook, and home-remedy handbook all rolled into one" (San Francisco Chronicle) is available in trade paper with the original art from the hardcover.
Author
Series
Ya-Yas volume 1
Formats
Description
The Walker clan, Vivi and Big Shep; their children Sidda, Little Shep, Lulu, and Baylor; Vivi's long-time girlfriends the Ya-Yas; and neighbors Cheney and Willetta, live out their lives in flamboyant and secretive style in the bayou of Thorton, Louisiana.
16) As I lay dying
Author
Series
Description
Describes a family's struggle to get their mother properly buried, while they encounter catastrophes of flood and fire, as well as the chaos of their own feelings.
Author
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Description
Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.
18) Roots
Author
Description
A black American traces his family's origins back to the African who was brought to America as a slave in 1767.
Author
Description
"A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has...
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