 | John McKnight and Peter Block c2010 The Abundant Community gives voice to the ideal of a beloved community. It assures us that when we join together with our neighbors we are the architects of the future where we want to live. [173 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2001 When ten people arrive on private Indian Island off England's southwest coast, lured to a mansion by invitations from a mysterious host, terror mounts as one guest after another is murdered, in a classic whodunit that is an elaboration of the famous children's rhyme "Ten Little Indians." [183 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2008
Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher's soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe's maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver. [321 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2007
Three children lost their innocence--as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935--and their lives are changed forever. [480 pages] FICTION
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Traces the rewards and pitfalls of a Chinese mother's exercise in extreme parenting, describing the exacting standards applied to grades, music lessons, and avoidance of Western cultural practices. [237 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c1994
When Mary Russell meets famous detective Sherlock Holmes, she discovers that he is also a beekeeper. Soon she finds herself on the trail of kidnappers and discovers a plot to kill both Holmes and herself. [347 pages] FICTION
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 | Markus Zusak
c2006
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel – a young German girl who’s book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors. [550 pages] FICTION
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 | c2006
Bored and lonely after his family moves from Berlin to a place called "Out-With" in 1942, Bruno, the son of a Nazi officer, befriends a boy in striped pajamas who lives behind a wire fence. [215 pages] FICTION
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 | c2006
Four years after the murder of her younger sisters, Veronica Swan moved to California to train as an EMT, where she went to work as a nanny for Scott Early, the man who killed her sisters. Scott, a diagnosed schizophrenic, was deemed incompetent to stand trial and was committed to a mental institution. Although her Mormon family forgave Scott in order to get on with their lives, Veronica plans to avenge her sisters’ murders. [289 pages] FICTION
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 | c2011 Forging a deep friendship with a Wampanoag chieftain's son on the Great Harbor settlement where her minister father is working to convert the tribe, Bethia follows his subsequent ivy league education and efforts to bridge cultures among the colonial elite. [306 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2011 White Southerner Roxanne Reeves teams up with an elderly retired black schoolteacher to research the town's African-American history for a tour, and is transported back into the racially charged past and the events that continue to change lives. [312 pages] FICTION |
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 | While a cellist plays at the site of a mortar attack to commemorate the deaths of twenty-two friends and neighbors, a woman sniper secretly protects the life of the cellist as her army becomes increasingly threatening. [235 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2006
A black man’s tribute to his white mother. The Color of Water tells the remarkable story of Ruth McBride Jordan, the two good men she married, and the 12 good children she raised. [382 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c2002
In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of two families--the farming Pye family, and zoologist Kate Morrison and her two brothers--are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy. [288 pages] FICTION
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 | c2003
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor’s dog and uncovers secret information about his mother. [226 pages] FICTION
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 | c2010
Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart. [541 pages] FICTION
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 | c2009 Story of a man’s decision to leave his job as a geography teacher in England to travel home from Siberia by bicycle and his adventures along the way. [399 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c1985 For Davita Chandal, growing up in the New York of the 1930s and '40s is an experience of joy and sadness. Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and better world. But as the deprivations of war and depression take a ruthless toll, Davita unexpectedly turns to the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned, finding there both a solace for her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence. [371 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2003
True story of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 which tells the stories of two men who helped shape the history of the event- architect Daniel H. Burnham, who coordinated its construction, and serial killer Herman Mudgett. [447 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | Digging to America
Anne Tyler
c2006 Two families meet by chance at an airport where they are both waiting to adopt infant daughters from Korea. The families become friends and decide to meet together every year. [277 pages] FICTION |
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 | Elizabeth Gilbert. c2006 Traces the author's decision to quit her job and travel the world for a year after suffering a midlife crisis and divorce, a journey that took her to three places in her quest to explore her own nature and learn the art of spiritual balance. [334 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2006
True account of a 17 year old boy’s harrowing attempt to travel to the United States to locate his mother, who left him in the Honduras when he was 5 years old. [291 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c1981 After being captured in an Indian raid during 1755, Mary Draper Ingles follows the Ohio River for 1,000 miles to return home to Virginia by herself. [399 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2008
Recounts the story of a young sociologist whose infiltration of a Chicago drug gang was originally introduced in the work "Freakonomics," describing the author's idealism, his friendship with gang leader JT, and his witness to the organization's crack-selling trade. Contains strong language. [302 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2008
Documents the unsolved theft of twelve masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, tracing the research of the late art detective Harold Smith while recounting the author's own forays into the art underworld. [272 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2005
A poor seventeenth-century servant girl knows her place in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, but when he begins to paint her, nasty whispers and rumors circulate throughout the town. [233 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2005
A remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. [288 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | Ira Wagler c2011 Describes the author's Amish childhood, his departure from his community at age sixteen, his struggles to return to the Amish way of life, and his final
aceptance of his own identity and his past. [271 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2008 In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation. [277 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2009
Presents a novel based on the life of the author's grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed five hundred miles as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children. [272 pages] FICTION
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 | c2008 Having devotedly cared for a lone elephant at a dilapidated zoo for more than forty years, Samson hopes to be able to retire when he hires a promising assistant Neva, who forces Samson to acknowledge that the elephant also needs the company of her own kind. [319 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2010 Presents the story of the four-year old son of a Nebraska pastor who during
emergency surgery slips from consciousness and enters heaven. [163 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2009 Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project. [451 pages] FICTION |
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 | c1998
Virginia Woolf is brought back to life in an intertwining of her
story with those of two more contemporary women. In Woolf's life, she awakens one morning in London in 1923 with a dream that will become Mrs. Dalloway. In the present, Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party in Greenwich Village for her oldest love, a poet dying from AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown is pregnant and unsettled, trying to prepare for her husband's birthday, but wanting nothing more than to sit and read Woolf. [228 pages] FICTION |
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 | Daniel J. Wolff c2009 Wolff presents an engaging, provocative history of American ideas, told through the educations (both in and out of school) of 12 great figures, from Benjamin Franklin to Elvis Presley. [345 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2008
In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place. [374 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2010 Hiding her unhappiness from those who believe she has a perfect life, former beauty queen Maggie has an unexpected change of circumstances that leads to surprising discoveries and valuable lessons in friendship. [314 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2010
Documents the story of how scientists took cells from an unsuspecting descendant of freed slaves and created a human cell line that has been kept alive indefinitely, enabling discoveries in such areas as cancer research, in vitro fertilization, and gene mapping. [384 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2011 Documents the efforts of the first American ambassador to Hitler's Germany, William E. Dodd, to acclimate to a residence in an increasingly violent city where he is forced to associate with the Nazis while his daughter pursues a relationship with Gestapochief Rudolf Diels. [448 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2004
A recent medical school graduate, Barry Laverty, is delighted by the opportunity to join a small rural practice in the beautiful hills of Ballybucklebo, Northern Ireland, until he meets his superior, Dr. Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, a cantankerous older physician who has his own way of doing things. [351 pages] FICTION
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 | Jane Austen Book Club
Karen Joy Fowler
c2004 As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love. [288 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2007
Deborah Rodriguez, a hairdresser from Holland, Michigan, travels to Afghanistan and opens a cosmetology school to help women learn a marketable skill so they are able to support themselves and their families. [275 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c2003
Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan boy and his servant’s son, in a story that spans the final days of Afghanistan’s monarchy through the atrocities of the present day. [371 pages] FICTION
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 | c2011
The story of a woman whose gift for flowers helps her change the lives of
others even as she struggles to overcome her own past. [322 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2008
Randy Pausch, a computer science professor, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In his book he has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. This book will be shared for generations to come. [206 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c2006 True story of two families who lived in the same house in the West Bank, the Palestinian family who built it and the Jewish family who lived in it from 1948-84. [362 page] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2008
A controversial critique of American history textbooks. Readers interested in history, whether liberal or conservative, professional or layperson, will find food for thought here. [444 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c2001
Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper’s son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain. [401 pages] FICTION
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 | Chris Cleave c2008 Presents a tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women. [271 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2009
In Little Pink House, award-winning investigative journalist Jeff Benedict takes readers behind the scenes of the Susette Kelo case (a case that ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court) in which Kelo led the charge to take on corporate America to save her home. [397 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c2007 Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society. [362 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2007,2006
Julia puts her heart into aiding troubled children, so she's devastated when she's forced to give up her practice. Then she connects with a mute little girl, who's been abandoned, and the doctor fighting to protect her. [391 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2010 Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired) leads a quiet life in the village of St. Mary, England, until his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But will their relationship survive in a society that considers Ali a foreigner? [358 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2009 Rhoda Janzen, a professor at Hope College, describes how after her husband left her for a relationship with a man and she subsequently was seriously injured in a car crash, she returned home to her close-knit Mennonite family and came to terms with her failed marriage and her choices in life. [241 pages] NON-FICTION |
| |
 | Monkey Wrench Gang  Edward Abbey
c1975 Eco-terrorists take the law into their own hands and embark on a "beautification" program of Arizona and Utah. Their ultimate goal is to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam, and along the way this team of misfits--A. K. (Doc) Sarvis, Bonnie Abzug, George Hayduke, and Seldom Seen Smith--wreak havoc across the Southwest. [352 pages] FICTION |
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 | c1993
Story of the events of the summer of the author’s twelfth year, which altered his view of his family and the world forever. [169 pages] FICTION
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 | Tracy Kidder c2003 Paul Farmer, doctor, Harvard professor, infectious disease specialist, found his life's calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring medicine to those who need it most. [317 pages] NON-FICTION |
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When stay-at-home mom Jude Farraday takes in Lexi, a former foster child with a dark past, the girl becomes inseparable from Jude's teenage twins before a shattering accident rips the family apart and sets the stage for a sobering confrontation years later. [385 pages] FICTION
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 | c2003
In 1906, sixteen-year-old Mattie, determined to attend college and be a writer against the wishes of her father and fiancé, takes a job at a summer inn where she discovers the truth about the death of a guest. Based on a true story. [389 pages] FICTION
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Compelling tale of the escape of a mother and her daughter from Iran. [420 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c2008
At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her. [270 pages] FICTION |
| |
 | Bonnie Jo Campbell c2011 Margo Crane, a beautiful and uncanny markswoman takes to the Stark River after being complicit in the death of her father and embarks on an odyssey in search of her vanished mother in this novel from the National Book Award finalist. [348 pages] FICTION |
| |
 | c1998
An Indian request in 1864 for 1,000 white brides to ensure peace is secretly approved by the U.S. government in this alternate-history novel. Their journey west is described by May Dodd, a high-society woman released from an asylum where she was incarcerated by her family for an affair. [304 pages] FICTION
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 | c2011
Follows the life of Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, as she navigates 1920s Paris [324 pages] FICTION
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 | Offered a coveted job to analyze and conserve a priceless Sarajevo Haggadah, Australian rare-book expert Hanna Heath discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the volume's ancient binding that reveal its historically significant origins. [372 pages] FICTION |
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 | Plain Truth
Jodi Picoult
c2000 The discovery of a dead baby under a pile of old blankets in Aaron Fishers’ barn sets off a scandal in Amish country and an investigation that could implicate Fisher’s eighteen-year-old daughter. [405 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2011 A 5-year-old narrates a story about his life growing up in a single room where his mother aims to protect him from the man who has held her prisoner for seven years since she was a teenager. [321 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2006
The co-author relates how he was held under plantation-style slavery until he fled in the 1960s and suffered homelessness for an additional eighteen years before the wife of the other co-author, an art dealer accustomed to privilege, intervened. [237 pages] NON-FICTION |
| |
 | c2007
On the sixtieth anniversary of the 1942 roundup of Jews by the French police in the Vel d'Hiv section of Paris, American journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article on this dark episode during World War II and embarks on investigation that leads her to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah, a young girl caught up in the raid. [288 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2002
After her “stand-in mother”, a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters. [302 pages] FICTION
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 | c2008 Moving from Fort Worth, Texas to New Bern, Connecticut to open a quilt shop begins a new life for Evelyn Dixon, bringing unexpected connections with a trio of women who come to the shop for quilting classes. [344 pages] FICTION |
| |
 | Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Lisa See
c2005
Lily, now eighty years old, sets out to tell the story of her life and of the most important relationship in that life: her friendship with the long-dead Snow Flower. [258 pages] FICTION |
| |
 | c2008 The story of an aging train robber on a quest to reconcile the claims of love and judgment on his life, and the failed writer who goes with him. [287 pages] FICTION |
| |
 | A charming memoir from Vietnamese immigrant Bich Minh Nguyen. She writes of her desire to belong, her passion for American food, and her wish to become a “real” American. [256 pages] NON-FICTION |
| |
 | c2009
Feeling at the top of her game when she is suddenly diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease, Harvard psychologist Alice Howland struggles to find meaning and purpose in her life as her concept of self gradually slips away. [320 pages] FICTION |
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 | Irene Nemirovsky c2006 A story of life in France under Nazi occupation includes two parts--"Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied village rife with resentment, resistance, and collaboration. [395 pages] FICTION |
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 | Sandra Dallas c2007
Her life turned upside-down when a Japanese internment camp is opened in their small Colorado town, Rennie witnesses the way her community places suspicion on the newcomers when a young girl is murdered. [305 pages] FICTION
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 | c2007
Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in wartown Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage. [384 pages] FICTION
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 | c2006
True story of a man who built the first school for the impoverished town of Korphe, Pakistan, and formed the Central Asia Institute, which has constructed over 50 schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. [338 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c1960
Scout’s father defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town in the 1930s. [281 pages] FICTION
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 | c2008
Exploring the secrets and complexities lying at the heart of family life and relationships, a collection of eight stories includes the title work, about a young mother in a new city whose father tends her garden while hiding a secret love affair. [333 pages] FICTION
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| |
 | Unbroken : a World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption
Laura Hillenbrand
c2010
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared--Lt. Louis Zamperini. Captured by the Japanese and driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor. [473 pages] NON-FICTION |
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 | c1852 Uncle Tom's master sells him, separating him from his wife, and he becomes attached to the gentle daughter of his new owner, but after her death, he is sold to the evil Simon Legree. [379 pages] FICTION |
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 | c1998
The subtitle of the book is Rediscovering American on the Appalachian Trail and rediscover America is just what the author did, after having lived in Europe for many years. [276 pages] NON-FICTION
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 | c2010
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. [622 pages] NON-FICTION |
| |
 | Water for ElephantsSara Gruen
c2006
Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski Remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope. [335 pages] FICTION |
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 | Gary D. Schmidt c2007 During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker's classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in. [264 pages] FICTION |
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 | c2011 When Alice Ripley's boyfriend breaks up with her and she loses her job at the library during the Great Depression, she heads to the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, where she volunteers to stay for a while to help the librarian there. [391 pages] FICTION |
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 | Timothy Egan c2006 The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist brings together an oral history of the American Dust Bowl that devastated the Great Plains during the Great Depression, following several families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region and their desperate struggle to persevere despite the devastation. [340 pages] NON-FICTION |
| |
 | Geraldine Brooks c2002 Young Anna Frith, a vicar's maid, is faced with the loss of her family, the disintegration of her local community, and a passionate, illicit love as she and her village confront the horrors of the plague, in a historical novel based on real-life events in seventeenth-century England. [308 pages] FICTION |
| |
 | You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Heather Sellers
c2010
Moving family memoir from author and Hope College Professor Heather Sellers who has face blindness, also known as prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that prevents her from recognizing people by face. [356 pages] NON-FICTION |
| |
 | In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun are cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water. In the days after the storm, Abdulrahman traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared--arrested and accused of being an agent of al Qaeda. [351 pages] NON-FICTION |