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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
(12 and 1 Large Print Copies)
The story of Huck Finn who shoves off with Jim on a rhapsodic raft journey down the Mississippi River. As Huck learns about love, responsibility, and morality, the trip becomes a metaphoric voyage through his own soul, culminating in the glorious moment . . . More
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Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh
(13 Copies)
In the town of Bakerton, dominated by the towers of the title (made of slowly combusting piles of scrap coal), poor families live in ethnic enclaves. Italian Rose Novak broke with tradition by marrying a Polish man, but he dies in the book's first chapter, and Rose and her five children struggle through the years that follow. More |
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The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter
(7 Copies)
This "nightmarish but authentic" portrait of a high school English teacher and the defiant, uncontrollable students in his charge rings with ferocious urgency and harrowing realism. A timeless rendering of youth culture set against the backdrop of 1950s New York City. More |
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Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani
(8 Copies)
Ave Maria reaches her thirty-fifth year and resigns herself to the single life, filling her days with hard work, fun friends, and good books. Then, one fateful day, Ave Maria's past opens wide with the revelation of a long-buried secret that will alter the course of her life. Before she knows it, Ave Maria is fielding . . . More
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Breaking Her Fall by Stephen Goodwin
(8 Copies)
Tucker Jones is a 44-year-old divorced father of two living in Washington, D.C. His life is settled in a comfortable routine until the night he receives an enigmatic phone call informing him that his 14-year-old daughter, Kat, has been involved in sexual games at a party. More |
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Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
(10 copies)
Breathing lessons takes place on one summer day, when Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Pennsylvania to a funeral, with an accidental detour involving an old black man they pass on the road and a side trip to see their former daughter-in-law and their seven-year-old grandchild. More |
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Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos
(5 Copies)
When elderly Margaret Hughes discovers that she has a malignant brain tumor, she refuses treatment and decides to take a nice young tenant into her huge, lonely Seattle mansion for company. What she gets is Wanda Schultz, a tough-as-nails stage manager who is secretly seeking the man who left her. More |
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The Captain’s Wife by Douglas Kelley
(6 Copies)
Based on the true story of Mary Patten, he story begins in 1856 on the voyage from New York to San Francisco through one of the most dangerous straits in the western hemisphere: Cape Horn. Early on, trouble erupts on the ship, forcing Mary to take command of the ship. More |
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 Cane River by Lalita Tademy
(10 Copies)
Includes 10 copies of the title and a notebook containing aids to book discussion. On a Creole plantation on the banks of Louisiana's Cane River, four generations of astonishing women battle injustice to unite their family and forge success on their own terms. They are women whose lives begin in slavery, who weather the Civil War, and who struggle . . More |
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The Cider House Rules by John Irving
(6 Copies)
The Cider House Rules begins during the early '40s in a ramshackle Maine orphanage, where Dr. Larch cares for unwanted children and performs illegal abortions. His oldest charge and reluctant protégé, Homer, yearns to make his own way in the world and begins by hiring out as an apple-picker for nearby orchard. More |
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Excalibur, a novel of Arthur by Bernard Cornwell
(7 Copies)
The Winter King and Enemy of God established Bernard Cornwell as the writer capable of taking the beloved King Arthur legend and making it fresh and new for our time. In this final volume of the trilogy, Arthur and his warriors must face their enemies -- now allied with Arthur's betrayer Lancelot -- for the throne of all Britain. More |
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The Girls by Helen Yglesias
(9 Copies)
The "girls" are the four Witkovsky sisters: Eva, 95, debilitated by carelessly monitored drugs; Naomi, 90, fighting cancer but maintaining a crown of naturally black hair; Flora, 85, dressed in garish outfits as she does her standup routine on the senior circuit; and Jenny, the youngest, who comes to care for the others. More |
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 The Good, Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood by Sy Montgomery
(5 Copies)
When Sy Montgomery opened her heart to a sick piglet, she had no idea that this creature, later named Christopher Hogwood, would provide her with something she had sought all her life: an anchor to family, home, and community. More |
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The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans
(10 Copies)
One morning while teenage Grace Maclean is riding Pilgrim, she has a horrendous meeting with a truck that leaves her and her four-legged friend damaged in mind, body, and spirit. Meanwhile, her jaded, brilliant, bitchy mom is working out a wrinkle in her self-absorbed existence when she gets a call about Grace's accident. More |
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The Hours by Michael Cunningham
(5 Copies)
The Hours is both homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway. More . . . |
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
(9 Copies)
In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. More |
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Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang
(6 Copies)
In China in the early 1930s, sisters Junan and Yinan are inseparable, even as Junan matures into beauty and Yinan remains plain. Junan enters into an arranged marriage and falls in love with her soldier husband. Separated from him when the Japanese invade China, Junan sends Yinan to keep her husband's household. More |
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The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
(7 Copies and 1 Large Print)
Michael Shaara's account of the three most important days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors, including Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and Hancock. The most inspiring figure in the book, however, is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain . . . More |
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The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
(8 Copies)
The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places . . . More
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The Ladies of Covington Send Their Love by Joan Medlicott
(9 Copies)
Amelia, Hannah and Grace all live in a Pennsylvania boardinghouse, unhappily confronting the insults and injuries involved in aging. When Amelia inherits a deteriorating farmhouse in Covington, N.C., the three decide to move in together, gearing up to rehabilitate both the farmhouse and their lives. More |
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The Magic of Ordinary Days by Ann Howard Creel
(7 Copies)
Livvy Dunne is a thoughtful 24-year-old with yearnings toward archeology, who in a rash moment in WWII Colorado becomes pregnant and is forced into a marriage of convenience by her sternly puritanical minister father. She goes off to Ray Singleton's remote farm knowing nothing about him except that he is lonely . . . More |
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Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
(7 Copies)
A snowstorm immobilizes Lexington, Ky., in 1964, and when young Norah Henry goes into labor, her husband, orthopedic surgeon Dr. David Henry, must deliver their babies himself, aided only by a nurse. Seeing his daughter's handicap, he instructs the nurse, Caroline Gill, to take her to a home and later tells Norah, who was drugged . . . More |
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The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
(9 Copies and 1 Large Print)
The play tells the story of a merchant, Antonio, and the more famous villain Shylock, a Jewish moneylender. When Bassanio requires money to travel to Belmont to court the wealthy Portia, he approaches his friend Antonio. Because all of Antonio's merchant ships are at sea, he approaches Shylock for a loan on Bassanio's behalf. More |
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The Mercy of Thin Air by Ronlyn Domingue
(8 Copies)
Raziela Nolan is in the throes of a magnificent love affair when she dies in a tragic accident. In an instant, she leaves behind her one true love and her dream of becoming a doctor--but somehow, she still remains. Immediately after her death, Razi chooses to stay betwween--a realm that exists after life and before . . . More
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The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
(6 Copies and 1 Large Print)
Jessie Sullivan, is awakened by a shrilling phone late one night to horrifying news: her mother, who has never recovered from her husband Joe's death 33 years earlier, has chopped off her own finger with a cleaver. Frantic with worry, and apprehensive at the thought of returning to the small island where she grew up . . . More |
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My Antonia by Willa Cather
(7 Copies and 1 Large Print)
My Ántonia is a soulful and rich portrait of a pioneer woman's simple yet heroic life. The spirited daughter of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia must adapt to a hard existence on the desolate prairies of the Midwest. More |
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My Name is Red by Orphan Pamuk
(5 Copies)
In 16th-century Istanbul, master miniaturist and illuminator of books Enishte Effendi is commissioned to illustrate a book celebrating the sultan. Soon he lies dead at the bottom of a well, and how he got there is the crux of this novel. More |
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Oh My Stars by Lorna Landvik
(5 Copies and 1 Large Print)
It's 1937, and shy, homely, 18-year-old Violet Mathers—battered by a mother's desertion, a father's contempt and an accident that cost her her arm—has decided to travel from her Kentucky hometown to the Golden Gate Bridge, from which she plans to jump. More |
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The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
(8 Copies)
Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The painted veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic. More
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A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
(6 Copies)
Forster's novel follows the fortunes of three English newcomers to India and the Indian with whom they cross destinies. Despite their countrymen's disapproval, Miss Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Mr. Fielding are all eager to meet Indians, and in Dr. Aziz they find a perfect companion: educated, westernized, and open-minded. More |
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Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
(6 Copies)
Philadelphia defense lawyer Ellie Hathaway retreats to her great Aunt Leda's home in Paradise, PA, to get a break from her high-pressure job. Almost at the same time that she arrives, a dead baby is discovered in the barn of an Amish farmer. A police investigation reveals that the mother is an 18-year-old unmarried Amish girl, Katie Fisher . . . More |
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The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
(7 Copies)
The Piano Tuner, is the mesmerizing story of Edgar Drake, commissioned by the British War Office in 1886 to travel to hostile Burma to repair a rare Erard grand piano vital to the Crown's strategic interests. Eccentric Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll has brokered peace with local warlords primarily through music . . . More |
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The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
(6 Copies)
Henry Wingo is a shrimper who fishes the seas off the South Carolina coast and regularly squanders what little money he amasses in farcical business schemes; his beautiful wife, Lila, is both his victim and a manipulative and guilt-inflicting mother. The story is narrated by one of the children, Tom Wingo . . . More |
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The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
(6 Copies)
Stevens, an elderly butler who has spent 30 years in the service of Lord Darlington, ruminates on the past and inadvertently slackens his rigid grip on his emotions to confront the central issues of his life. More |
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Sarah’s Quilt, a Novel of Sarah Agnes Prine in the Arizona Territories, 1906 by Nancy E. Turner
(10 Copies)
Sarah's quilt continues the dramatic story of pioneer woman Sarah Agnes Prine. Set in the Arizona Territories. More |
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Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
(7 Copies and 1 Large Print)
The story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who represent sense and sensibility respectively. When both appear to be deserted by the young men they had intended to marry, the stage is set for a delicious comedy of manners . . . More |
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Swimming by Joanna Hershon
(7 Copies)
On a beautiful summer weekend, Aaron Wheeler brings his college girlfriend, Suzanne, home to meet his family in New Hampshire. Golden boy Aaron is a few years older than his volatile, difficult brother, Jack. The visit is pleasant if tense, as Suzanne finds herself drawn to Jack against her better judgment. More |
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The Turtle Warrior by Mary Relindes Ellis
(6 Copies)
John Lucas is a subsistence farmer and an abusive alcoholic feared by his wife and his children. In 1967, 18-year-old Jimmy, who slicks his hair into a pompadour and plays pranks on gentle eight-year-old Bill, enlists in the Marines, intending, in part, to prove something to the brutal father who'd lied about his own military service. More |
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What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? by Peter Hedges
(5 Copies)
Gilbert Grape is 24 and stuck in a rut. Trapped by feelings of responsibility to his eccentric family, he works bagging groceries in their small Iowa town. And what a family! More |
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Year of Wonders, a Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
(6 Copies)
Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? More |
