| About Alice by Calvin Trillin. Trillin, a staff writer with the New Yorker since 1963, has often written about the members of his family, notably his wife, Alice, whom he married in 1965. Avoiding expressions of grief, Trillin unveils a straightforward, honest portrait of their marriage and family life. |
| Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik. During 30 turbulent years, a group of women in Freesia, Minnesota find their book group turning into a lifeline. |
| Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. In her first full-length nonfiction narrative, bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver opens readers' eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: you are what you eat. |
| Astrid and Veronika by Linda Olssen. With extraordinary emotional power, Olsson's stunningly well-crafted debut novel recounts the unusual and unexpected friendship that develops between two women. Set against a haunting Swedish landscape, this is a lyrical and meditative novel of love and loss. |
| Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai. The story of two sons of doctors who at the age of 17 are sent to a remote mountain village during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where their ingenuity helps them survive four long years of banishment. |
| Between Friends by Debbie Macomber. The New York Times bestselling author presents a story in which every woman will recognize herself -- and her best friend. Friends since the postwar 1950s, Jillian Lawton and Lesley Adamski share every grief and every joy, proving what friendship really means. |
| Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides. Sides' extraordinary book brings the history of the American conquest of the West to life. A tale with many heroes and villains, at the center stands the remarkable figure of Kit Carson--the legendary trapper, scout, and soldier who embodies all the contradictions and ambiguities of the American West experience. |
| Bold Spirit by Linda Laurence Hunt. In 1896 a Norwegian immigrant named Helga Estby dares to cross 3,500 miles of the American continent, on foot, to win a $10,000 wager. |
| Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. A picturesque novel of good-natured bums and warm-hearted prostitutes who lived on the fringes of Monterey, California, during the 1930s. |
| Children's Blizzard by David Laskin. Laskin writes a gripping chronicale of an 1888 violent blizzard that swept across the American plains, killing hundreds of people, many of them children making their way home from school. |
| Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. In this fascinating book, Diamond seeks to understand the fates of past societies that collapsed for ecological reasons, combining the most important policy debate of this generation with the romance and mystery of lost worlds. |
| Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. Life in a New England seaside village in the late 1800's, as seen through the eyes of a summer visitor. |
| Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The Pulitzer prize winning author's memoir of her experience managing a 72 acre orange grove in Florida during the Great Depression. |
| Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. A young autistic boy attempts to investigate the suspicious death of a neighbor's dog. |
| Daughter of China by Meihong Xu. The true tale of a woman soldier in the Chinese Army, her forbidden love for an American, and her seemingly impossible escape from China. |
| Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert. A celebrated writer pens an irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life. |
| The Egg & I by Betty MacDonald. A classic account of raising chickens and children in the 1940s on a dilapidated 40-acre farm on the rainy, remote Olympic Peninsula. |
| Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. When the totalitarian regime orders all books to be destroyed, Guy Montag, a "fireman" assigned to burn books, suddenly realizes their merit. |
| Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. On his 83rd birthday, Eddie is killed in a tragic accident and enters the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination but a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some familiar, others strangers. |
| Flight by Sherman Alexie. Alternately heartbreaking and wondrous, Sherman Alexie's first novel in ten years tells the story of an orphan careening through foster homes until finally, not long after we meet him, he is about to commit an act of violence when he suddenly begins an unforgettable journey through time. |
| Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland. A fictionalized account of the life of Emily Carr, an artist who traveled through the native villages of coastal British Columbia in the early 1900s. |
| The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne. The Ghost at the Table by Suzanne Berne. The Fiske family is gathered at the exquisitely restored New England home of the second of three sisters. The family table groans with the weight of guilt and blame in this taut, psychological drama of a family's unraveling. |
| Gilead by Marilynn Robinson. As his life winds down, Rev. John Ames relates the story of his own father and grandfather, both preachers but one a pacifist and one a gun-toting abolitionist. |
| Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. |
| The Highest Tide by Tim Lynch. While the Pacific Northwest sea continues to offer him discoveries from its mysterious depths, such as a giant squid, a teenaged boy struggles to deal with the difficulties that come with the equally mysterious process of growing up. |
| An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order by Nancy Klein Maguire. In this riveting chronicle, Maguire presents a uniquely intimate portrait of the customs and practices of a monastic order and follows the trial of faith of five young men in the Carthusians, the most rigorous and ascetic monastic order in the Western world. |
| Jesus Land: A Memoir by Julie Scheeres. This riveting memoir is the story of a 16-year-old girl and her adopted, black, 16-year-old brother who are sent to a reform school in the Dominican Republic by their violent father and distant mother more involved with her church's missionaries than her own children. |
| The Knitting Circle by Ann Hood. After the sudden loss of her only child, Mary Baxter joins a knitting circle as a way to fill the empty hours and lonely days. |
| Lost German Slave Girl by John Bailey. On an 1843 spring morning in New Orleans' Spanish Quarter, a woman recognizes a German girl who disappeared twenty-five years earlier and is now a slave, with no memory of her family's perilous journey from their German village. This tour de force of investigative history is a fascinating exploration of slavery and its laws, a reconstruction of mid-19th-century New Orleans, and a riveting courtroom drama. |
| Love in the Driest Season by Neely Tucker. After witnessing the devastating consequences of AIDS and economic disaster on the children of Zimbabwe, Neely Tucker and his wife, Vita, volunteered at an orphanage where a critically ill infant, Chipo, was trusted to their care. Their story emerges as an inspiring testament to the miracles that love and determination can achieve. |
| Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean. In this sublime debut novel, set amid the horrors of the siege of Leningrad in World War II, a gifted writer explores the power of memory to save . . . and betray. |
| March by Geraldine Brooks. The Pulitzer prize-winning author of Year of Wonders creates a story of the Civil War as seen through the character Captain March, a recreation of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. |
| Memory of Running by Ron McLarty. One week, Smithy Ide, a 43-year-old, 279-pound self-proclaimed loser with a dead-end job, loses his parents in an accident and discovers that his sister has been found dead. He mounts his old Raleigh bicycle and finds himself peddling across the country, on a journey of discovery. |
| Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. The story of a Greek immigrant couple and the astonishing genetic history that turns their daughter Callie into Cal. |
| Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers. After the death of her longtime friend, schoolteacher Julia Garnet takes an apartment in Venice, falls in love with an art dealer, and unravels the ancient story of Tobias and the Angel at her new church. |
| Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. On a war torn tropical island, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations. |
| Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder. The story of Dr. Paul Farmer, who through his charity, Partners in Health, has helped to increase the global initiative on fighting infectious diseases. |
| My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. An evocative memoir of Durrell's early years on the island of Corfu, with endearing portraits of various eccentrics and animals. |
| My Jim by Nancy Rawles. A spare and beautiful meditation on love and loss, this novel follows the life of Sadie, the abandoned wife of the escaped slave Jim from Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." |
My Sister’s Keeperby Jodi Picoult. Written with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity, this novel is about a teen who was conceived as a bone marrow match for her sister Kate, and what happens when she begins to question who she really is.
** This set is a Large Type kit. It contains 7 large type books and 7 regular type books. It will be heavier than the normal kit. |
| Night by Elie Wiesel. In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoire Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? |
| Out by Natsuo Kirino. Kirino's searing novel tells a story of random violence in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works the night shift making boxed lunches brutally strangles her deadbeat husband and then seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. |
| The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason. In 1886 a piano tuner is sent on a strange mission to Burma where he encounters a world more mysterious and dangerous that he ever could have imagined. |
| Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. The memoir of a woman professor who sponsored an illegal study session of great novels after the books were banned by the Iranian government. A moving testament to the power of art and its ability to improve people's lives. |
| River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard. At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, "The River of Doubt" is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on Earth, the Amazon. |
| Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength From Friends and Strangers by Elizabeth Edwards. The wife of vice-presidential candidate John Edwards presents a moving account of the importance of community in her life, from her childhood as a Navy pilot's daughter to her experiences of her husband's political campaigns to the death of her son and her own battle with breast cancer. |
| Shade of My Own Tree by Sheila Williams. When Opal Sullivan walks out on an abusive husband after fifteen years, her new beginning starts in Appalachian River country, where she sees a bit of herself in a graceful but dilapidated house that, like Opal, is worn-out and somewhat beaten up, but it still stands proudly and deserves a second chance. |
| Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. A historical and suspenseful tale of a boy's quest through the secrets and shadows of postwar Barcelona for a mysterious author whose book has proven to be as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget. |
| Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. Set in 19th-century China, See's national bestseller tells a story of two young women who find solace with each other, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart. |
| The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar. Here is a searing novel that vividly captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India, as witnessed through the lives of an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife and her stoic, illiterate domestic worker. |
| Sometimes I Dream in Italian by Rita Ciresi. A bittersweet comedy about sisters, love, and the Italian-American experience. |
| The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child--and the lack of understanding that led to tragedy. |
| Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. An extraordinary novel of life under Nazi occupation--discovered and published 62 years after the author's tragic death at Auschwitz. Subtle, often fiercely ironic, and deeply compassionate, it is both a piercing record of its time and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art. |
| Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb. The story of what happens to a young Irish girl abandoned in Morocco when her parents are murdered. Alone in the world, her search for home and family takes her down some surprising paths. |
| Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Chinua Achebe's first novel portrays the collision of African and European cultures in people's lives. Okonkwo, a great man in Igbo traditional society, cannot adapt to the profound changes brought about by British colonial rule. Yet, as in classic tragedy, Okonkwo's downfall results from his own character as well as from external forces. |
| Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson. The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban's backyard. |
| The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Librarian Henry De Tamble must contend with "chrono-displacement" disorder, which makes him travel back and forth in time. |
| Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill. Two-year-old Ursula Wong, of Chinese and Finnish decent, falls down a mine shaft in Upper Michigan, and as rescue efforts are carried on, stories about her remarkable ancestors are revealed. |
| Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Water for Elephants tells the story of a young man who leaves his life as a Cornell University veterinary student and jumps onto a train that happens to house the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. |
| The Wild Girl by Jim Fergus. From the award-winning author of One Thousand White Women, a novel in the tradition of Little Big Man, tracing one man's search for adventure and the wild Apache girl who invites him into her world. |
