By Brock Clarke

A delightfully dark story of Sam Pulsifer, the 'accidental arsonist and murderer' narrator who leads readers through a multilayered, flame-filled adventure about literature, lies, love and life....

Anna Karenina (864 pages)

By: Leo Tolstoy Richard Pevear Fiction

Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia.

The Art of Racing in the Rain (336 pages) Fiction
By: Garth Stein

A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty and hope, captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (184 pages) Fiction

By Dai Sijie (Author), Ina Rilke (Translator)

Part historical novel, part fable, part love story, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a moving testament to the transformative power of literature.

By Josephine Tey

Brat Farrar has been carefully coached to assume the identity of Patrick Ashby, heir to the Ashby fortune who disappeared when he was 13.

Bride Flight (441 pages) Fiction

Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven (375 pages) Comedy/mystery

By Fannie Flagg

Heaven is actually right here, right now, with people you love, neighbors you help, friendships you keep.

By Beverly Swerling
The novel begins in 1661 when Lucas Turner, a barber-surgeon, and his sister, Sally Turner, an apothecary, arrive in the Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam to start a new life.

Cutting for Stone (688 pages) Fiction
by Abraham Verghese

An unforgettable story of love and betrayal, compassion and redemption, exile and home that unfolds across five decades in India, Ethiopia, and America.

Dreaming in Cuban (272 pages) Fiction

By Cristina Garcia

The novel’s central themes include family relationships, exile, the divisiveness of politics, and memory. Cuban history and culture are important in the novel.

By Jeremy Fifkin

The European Dream may come to define the new century as the American Dream defined the century now past.

By Gita Nazareth

With mythical prose at times approaching verse, Forgiving Ararat works a miracle, bridging the chasm between life and death.

By Kate Jacobs

By Amanda Foreman

Sex, intrigue and adultery in the world of high politics and huge wealth in late eighteenth-century England. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was one of the most flamboyant and influential women …

By: Stieg Larsson

Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller…

The Girl Who Played With Fire (630 pages) Fiction

By: Stieg Larsson

Salander herself is drawn into a murderous hunt in which she is the prey, and which compels her to revisit her dark past in an effort to settle with it once and for all.

By John Steinbeck

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (290 pages) Fiction

By Mary A. Shaffer

The tragic stories of life under Nazi occupation that animate the novel and gives it its urgency; furthermore, the novel explores the darker side of human nature without becoming maudlin.

A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.

A small but sweeping masterpiece about the infamous New York hermits, the Collyer brothers.

An extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart.

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences

By Tim O’Brien

A politician's career is ruined overnight by revelations of his wartime participation in a village massacre in Vietnam while his personal life is undone by the sudden disappearance of his wife.

The Kitchen Boy - A Novel of the Last Tsar (240 pages) Fiction
by Robert Alexander  

Seen through the youthful, astonished eyes of Leonka but told by the cynical, misanthropic voice of Misha, the novel allows the reader to know a family that discovered greater nobility in its squalid exile than it had ever known in the gilded palaces of St. Petersburg.

A poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.

By Colum McCann

The critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Little Bee (288 pages) Fiction

By: Chris Cleave

The lives of Sarah and Little Bee violently collided on a beach in Nigeria, and when sheer determination and courage bring them back together again every secret of their hearts is unfolded before our eyes.

Lottery (318 pages) Fiction

By: Patricia Wood Patricia Wood’s Lottery offers a glimpse of the world as seen through the eyes of a man with limited cognitive abilities but boundless generosity of spirit.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (368 pages) Biography

By Lucette Lagnado

An inversion of the American dream set against the stunning portraits of three world cities, Lucette Lagnado's memoir offers a grand and sweeping story of faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph.

A refreshing heroine, appealing secondary characters and an absorbing plot, marred only by a somewhat bizarre conclusion.

By Amy Dickinson

Through hilarious anecdotes and poignant insight, Dickinson describes the many detours she’s made on the road that took her back to her hometown of Freeville, New York

Mister Pip (272 pages) Fiction
By Lloyd Jones

Set against the stunning beauty of Bougainville in the South Pacific during the civil war in the early 1990s, Lloyd Jones’s breathtaking novel shows what magic a child’s imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.

The Moonflower Vine (318 pages) Fiction

By Jetta Carleton

Jetta Carleton's autobiographical novel captures the mood and times of midwestern rural life and brings it to life.

Mrs. Bridge (240 pages) Fiction

By Evan S. Connell

Evan Connell paints a sympathetic but fairly condescending portrait of Mrs. Bridge as she fights to hold back the tide of these changes…The novels remain in the memory as triumphs of faultless realism.

The Mudbound (328 pages) Fiction

By Hillary Jordan

By Barb Ehrenreich

Critic Barbara Ehrenreich did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet.

Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her…

On Beauty (464 pages) Fiction
By: Zadie Smith

A hilarious, scathing, and emotionally profound novel of human aspiration and failure, an unfailingly perceptive portrait of a struggling marriage, and an empathetic depiction of adolescent struggle.

On The Road (320 pages) Fiction

By: Jack Kerouac

The most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century…

The Outcast (345 pages) Fiction

By: Sadie Jones

Set very firmly in the 1950s the book opens with the atmospheric homecoming of a nineteen-year-old Lewis after a spell in jail.

Outliers - The Story of Success (299pages) Non-Fiction

by Malcom Gladwell

Gladwell leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential

by Per Petterson

Trond Sander, a widower nearing seventy, moves to a bare house in remote eastern Norway, seeking the life of quiet contemplation that he has always longed for.

When an Australian rare-book conservator named Hanna Heath finds a butterfly wing, a salt crystal, a white hair, and bloodstains in the recently rediscovered Sarajevo Haggadah, she sets out to solve the mystery of the book’s origins…

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (384pp) Fiction
by Katherine Howe

A Reliable Wife (304 pages) Fiction

Riding Lesson (416 pages) Fiction

By Sara Gruen

A devastating accident that ends both the career of an Olympic-contender equestrienne and the life of her beloved horse sets off a chain of events that comes to a crisis point nearly twenty years later…

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child,

Run (320 pages) Fiction

By Ann Patchett

While mainly a domestic drama, Run also touches on larger themes-such as social exclusion, privilege, and obligation; politics; and religion and the afterlife.

Journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah…

The Shack (256 pages) Fiction

By William P. Young

In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant "The Shack" wrestles with the timeless question, "Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?"

Shanghai Girls (314 pages) Fiction

By Lisa See

Is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection, but like sisters everywhere they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries.

by Lisa Genova (320 pages) Fiction

A compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman's sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer's disease. Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind...

Suite Francaise (448 pages) Fiction

By Irene Nemirovsky

Suite Française, written as Nazi tanks rolled across France, captures the chaos, fear, humiliation, and very occasionally, the courage of the French, as well as portraying the complex emotions that developed between occupier and occupied.

Sweeping Up Glass (317 pages) Fiction

By Carolyn Wall

A tough and tender novel of love, race, and justice, and a ferocious, unflinching look at the power of family.

Taking The Leap (128 pages) Non-Fiction

By Penma Chödrön

Teacher Chödrön applies Buddhist wisdom to the problems of deeply ingrained reactions. It seems to speak directly to the angst we are currently facing.

At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape.

Those Who Save Us (496 pages) Fiction
By Jenna Blum

Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother-daughter drama,

Under The Banner Of Heaven (390 pages) Non-Fiction

By Jon Krakauer

A Story of Violent Faith, author Jon Krakauer attempts to help readers understand why religious people perform heinous acts of violence.

The Whistling Season (345 pages) Fiction

By Ivan Doig

A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic institutions that made it fertile

By: Aravind Adiga

In this darkly comic début novel set in India, Balram, a chauffeur, murders his employer, justifying his crime as the act of a "social entrepreneur.”

By: Diana Ackerman
Here is a true story-of human empathy and its opposite-that is simultaneously grave and exuberant, wise and playful. Ackerman has a wonderful tale to tell, and she tells it wonderfully.

(Total: 87 tittles)