Pierce County Library > Titles & Annotations for Adults

Titles & Annotations for Adults

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian [Added 12/08]
by Alexie Sherman. Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. {288 pages - Fiction}

The Alchemist, a Fable about Following your Dream
by Paulo Coelho. Follow Santiago, a Spanish shepherd boy who leaves home in search of treasure, and who finds rewards more fulfilling than any object ever dreamed of. {174 pages - Fiction}

Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood. Based on the true story of Grace Marks, a 16-year-old Canadian housemaid convicted of murder in 1843 who spent the next 30 years in an assortment of jails and asylums, where she was often exhibited as a star attraction. Dr. Simon Jordan, engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace, listens to the prisoner’s tale with a mixture of sympathy and disbelief, and uses the tools of the then rudimentary science of psychology. Booker Prize Finalist. {468 pages - Fiction}

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons
by Lorna Landvik. Join the five women who form this book club and share the triumphs, tragedies, hardships, joys and sorrows of their lives over the course of 30 years. {404 pages - Fiction}

The Art of Racing in the Rain [Added 12/08]
by Garth Stein. Told through the thoughts of the family dog, Stein's novel follows the affecting tale of Denny, a widower attempting to become a race-car champion even as he cares for his precious daughter and their beloved pet. {368 pages - Fiction}

Bee Season
by Myla Goldberg. Nine-year-old Eliza Naumann, a mediocre student, wins a statewide spelling bee which results in dramatic repercussions for the Naumanns. An exploration of a child's need for acceptance and the meaning of family. {288 pages - Fiction}

Bel Canto
by Anne Patchett. A very special birthday party is planned for Mr. Hosokawa, a well-connected Japanese businessman, now working in an unnamed South American country. At the home of the country's vice president, opera singer Roxane Cos will be performing for him and his guests, but armed revolutionaries invade the premises and hold the party goers hostage. As time passes in stalemated negotiations, Roxane gives daily concerts which form a background to Patchett's lyrical treatment of culture, communication, politics, and relationships. {318 pages - Fiction}

Beneath a Marble Sky: A Novel of the Taj Mahal [Added 12/08]
by John Shors. In seventeenth-century India, Princess Jahara tells the story of her parents mesmerizing love story, as her father, the reigning emperor, commissions the building of the Taj Mahal as a testament to the marvel of his love for his recently dead wife. {368 pages - Fiction}

Big Stone Gap
by Adriana Trigiani. Ave Maria Mulligan, spinster at thirty-five, lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, enjoying small-town life. She discovers that she's not who she always thought she was, and starts coping with marriage proposals, greedy family members, and the trip of a lifetime in this heart warming and humorous tale. {272 pages - Fiction}

Bold Spirit
by Linda Lawrence Hunt. This is the forgotten story of Helga Estby and her daughter, Clara, who leave Spokane in 1896 to walk to New York City on a $10,000 wager. The money, if won, will prevent the loss of the family homestead. The women face extreme cold and heat, hunger and exposure on their way east across Victorian America. {301 pages - Nonfiction}

The Bone People: A Novel [Added 12/08]
by Keri Hulme. A silver haired mute, an abused orphan, a laborer heavy with sustained loss, and a brilliant introspective recluse discover, after enormous struggle through injury and illness, what it means to lose and then regain a family. {464 pages - Fiction}

Broken for You
by Stephanie Kallos. Elderly Margaret Hughes finds that she has a malignant brain tumor and refuses treatment, deciding instead to take a boarder, Wanda Schultz, into her huge Seattle mansion. The two discover the joys of breaking antique china, and slowly build a friendship in this household of eccentric boarders. {371 pages - Fiction}

The Camel Bookmobile [Added 12/08]
by Masha Hamilton. Wanting to do something that matters, Fiona Sweeney, chooses to start a traveling library in the arid Kenyan bush. Encumbered by Western values, Fi struggles to understand the people she seeks to help. {308 pages - Fiction}

Cane River [Added 12/08]
by Lolita Tademy. Based on the author's own search of her family's past, "Cane River" is an epic novel based on the lives of four generations of African-American women from the early days of slavery through the Civil War and into a pre-Civil Rights South. {560 pages - Fiction

Caramelo [Added 11/06]
by Sandra Cisneros. The multi generational story of a working-class immigrant Mexican family is told through the eyes of granddaughter Lala. The experience of being a child of immigrants is told lovingly and with humor and in a language filled with images of Mexico and 1950s and '60s America. {443 pages - Fiction}

Chasing Fireflies [Added 12/08]
by Charles Martin. A woman on a suicide run kicks her abused son out of the car. The little boy, apparently mute, is an artistic prodigy who excels at chess. When paramedics find the malnourished six-year-old boy near a burning car that holds a dead woman, they wonder who he is and why he won't talk. Chase, a small-town journalist, is assigned to cover the story and investigate the boy's identity. But will his search unearth long-buried emotions about his own history? {342 pages - Fiction}

Christine Falls: A Novel [Added 12/08]
by Benjamin Black. One night, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, altering a file, tampering with a corpse, and concealing the cause of death. As Quirke reluctantly presses on toward the true facts behind the corpse’s death, he comes up against some insidious--and very well-guarded--secrets of Dublin's high Catholic society, among them members of his own family. {384 pages - Fiction}

Coldwater Revival [Added 11/07]
by Nancy Jo Jenkins. Young Emma Grace is supposed to be watching over her little brother, but he dies when he falls down a well. Emma Grace struggles with despair and grief, angry with God until He compassionately restores and heals her troubled life. {312 pages - Fiction}

The Complete Persepolis [Added 12/08]
by Marjane Satrapi. A graphic novel set in Iran when the hated Shah is defeated in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Now ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, Marji grows up to witnesses first hand how the new Iran has become a repressive tyranny on its own, and how equally difficult it can be in another country when her parents send her abroad to study in Vienna. {341 pages - Fiction

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
by Gregory Maguire. A widow and her two daughters become housekeepers to the family of a tulip merchant. Merchant and widow eventually marry, and their daughters become stepsisters, in a vivid and literary retelling of Cinderella. {368 pages - Fiction}

Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man Who Dared to See [Added 12/08]
by Robert Kurson. Blinded in a childhood accident, Mike May never hesitated to try anything—driving a motorcycle, hiking alone in the woods, downhill skiing—until the day, when May was 46, an ophthalmologist told him a new stem-cell and cornea transplant could restore his vision. May went forward, only to find that, even though his eye was now perfect, his brain had forgotten how to process visual input. Fascinated by colors and patterns, he had difficulty discerning facial features, letters, even men from women. How May adjusts to his medical miracle, living with the disappointments as well as the joys, makes for a remarkable story of courage and endurance. {306 pages - Nonfiction}

Crescent [Added 11/06]
by Diana Abu-Jaber. A multidimensional love story set in the Arab-American community of Los Angeles. Single and working as a chef, Sirine falls in love in this sensuous and gripping tale. {349 pages - Fiction}

A Crimson Portrait [Added 12/08]
by Jody Shields. On a country estate not far from London in 1915 a young woman mourns the loss of her husband, fallen on a distant battlefield. Her grief is interrupted as her home is transformed into a bustling military hospital to serve the wars most irreparably injured. The young widow finds solace in the company of a wounded soldier whose face she cannot see. {320 pages - Fiction}

The Devil in the White City Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America [Added 12/08]
by Erik Larson. Erik Larson takes readers into a richly complex moment in American history, a moment that would draw together the best and worst of the Gilded Age, the grandeur and triumph of the human imagination, and the poverty, violence, and depravity that surrounded it. {447 pages - Nonfiction}

Eat, Pray, Love [Added 11/07]
By Elizabeth Gilbert. The author made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success (marriage, house in the country, career) and find, instead, what she truly wanted from life. She sets out for a year to study three different aspects of her nature amid three different cultures. {334 pages - Nonfiction}

The Emperor of Ocean Park
by Stephen Carter. The world of Talcott Garland, an African American law professor at an Ivy League law school, is jarred by the death of his father, Judge Oliver Garland. Talcott’s sister decides that the judge was the victim not of a heart attack but of foul play. When two other people turn up dead Talcott pays attention to his sister's theories, learning secrets from his father's professional life. The author, in beautifully paced prose, challenges the reader's thoughts on the interaction of power and society. {657 pages - Fiction}

The Glass Castle [Added 11/06]
by Jeanette Walls. Memoir about a writer’s troubled childhood where here parents left their offspring to raise themselves. Despite poverty and shocking neglect, Walls writes of her love for her deeply flawed parents and recollects occasionally wonderful times. {288 pages - Biography}

The Gravedigger’s Daughter: A Novel [Added 12/08]
by Joyce Carol Oates. Rebecca Schwart was born on the boat that brought her parents from Nazi Germany. When she was 13, her father kills her mother and nearly killed her, before killing himself. Years later, after being nearly beaten to death by the abusive man she married, she escapes with her son, taking a new name and starting a new life. {582 Pages - Fiction}

Heart is in the Right Place [Added 12/08]
by Carolyn Jourdan. When her mother has a heart attack, Carolyn comes home to help her father with his rural medical practice in the Tennessee mountains. As she watches her father work, she sees what making a difference really means. {320 pages - Nonfiction}

The Highest Tide [Added 11/06]
by Jim Lynch. A 13-year-old with a passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound. Be prepared for poetic fireworks in the descriptions of the treasures in the sea. {247 pages - Fiction}

The History of Love [Added 11/06]
by Nicole Krauss. Leo Gursky, a WWII refugee in New York deliberately draws attention to himself to be sure he exists. What's really missing in his life is the woman he has always loved, the son who doesn't know that Leo is his father, and his lost novel, called The History of Love. Teenager Alma Singer, who was named after the heroine of The History of Love, also faces loneliness. The lives of Gursky and Singer intertwine with surprising twists and turns. {252 pages - Fiction}

Home Cooking; a Writer in the Kitchen
by Laurie Colwin. Essays as much about eating as cooking by this former columnist in “Gourmet”. {184 pages - Nonfiction}

I Feel Bad About My Neck [Added 12/08]
by Nora Ephron. Nora Ephron discusses everything - from how much she hates her purse to how much time she spends attempting to stop the clock: the hair dye, the treadmill, the lotions and creams that promise to slow the aging process but never do. Oh, and she can't stand the way her neck looks. But her dermatologist tells her there's no quick fix for that. {160 pages -Nonfiction}

In the Country Of Men [Added 12/08]
by Hisham Matar. A moving story of Libyan strongman Khadafy's 1969 September revolution as witnessed by nine-year-old Suleiman whose family becomes a target of the brutal regime. {256 pages - Fiction}

In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez. A novel based on the true story of the Mirabel sisters, who along with their husbands, worked to form an underground resistance movement against the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. {325 pages - Fiction}

Infidel [Added 12/08]
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali's biographical story tells how a bright little girl evolved out of dutiful obedience to become an outspoken, pioneering freedom fighter. As Western governments struggle to balance democratic ideals with religious pressures, no story could be timelier or more significant.--From publisher description. {384 pages - Nonfiction}

Inheritance of Loss [Added 12/08]
by Kiran Desai. In the Himalayan mountains, an embittered old judge, his orphaned granddaughter, and his cook witness the Nepalese insurgency that causes all their lives to descend into chaos. {384 pages - Fiction}

Into the Forest
by Jean Hegland. Set in the near future, this novel focuses on the relationship between two teenage sisters struggling to survive alone in their northern California home as their modern society decays and collapses around them. As their resources run out the girls are forced to reexamine their place in the world and their relationship to each other. {241 pages - Fiction}

Kabul Beauty School [Added 12/08]
by Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson. Soon after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a humanitarian aid group. As a hairdresser she was eagerly sought out by Westerners and Afghan women desperate for a good haircut. Thus the idea for the Kabul Beauty School was born. Within that small haven, the line between teacher and student quickly blurred as these vibrant women shared with Rodriguez their true stories and their hearts. {320 pages - Nonfiction}

Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini. Two motherless boys, Amir and Hassan, grow up together in Kabul, Afghanistan. A crime of violence changes their friendship. Later, as an adult, the cowardly Amir tries to learn the fate of Hassan’s son. {160 pages - Nonfiction}

The Known World [Added 11/06]
by Edward P. Jones. Henry Townsend, black farmer and former slave, is taught by William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. When Robbins dies unexpectedly, his widow must rely on Townsend in this unflinching look at slavery. {388 pages - Fiction}

The Last Chinese Chef [Added 12/08]
by Nicole Mones. When food writer, Maggie McElroy, goes to China to settle a claim against her late husband’s estate, her magazine editor asks her to write about Sam, a half-Chinese American chef as he gears up for China’s Olympic culinary competition. {304 pages - Fiction}

Little Heathens Hard Times and High Spirits [Added 12/08]
by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. A compelling memoir of Mildred’s hardscrabble life on an Iowa farm during the 1930s. With no electricity or indoor plumbing and with little heat or money on the farm, Mildred learns to find joy in the priceless blessings of life. {292 pages - Nonfiction}

The Lizard Cage [Added 12/08]
by Karen Connelly. Seven years into a 20 year sentence of solitary confinement for writing protest songs against the dictatorship of Burma, Teza uses Buddhist patience and humor to find meaning in the interminable days, and searches for news in every being and object that is grudgingly allowed into his cell. {464 pages - Fiction}

Lottery [Added 12/08]
by Patricia Wood. Raised by his grandmother after his parents abandoned him, 32-year-old Perry Crandall, with an IQ of 76, has always felt unwanted. Shortly after Gran dies Perry wins the lottery, and he must defend himself against his treacherous relatives who attempt to steal his fortune. {318 pages - Fiction}

Love in the Driest Season
by Neely Tucker.This true tale follows an American foreign correspondent and his wife’s struggle to save the life of, and eventually adopt, an infant girl who was abandoned in conflict-torn Zimbabwe. {269 pages - Nonfiction}

Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich. On a North Dakota Indian reservation, the lives of three women and their families intertwine through marriage and friendship. {384 pages - Fiction}

Luncheon of the Boating Party [Added 12/08]
by Susan Vreeland. Tracks Auguste Renoir as he conceives, plans and paints his 1880 masterpiece. A wealthy painter, an art collector, an Italian journalist, a war hero, a celebrated actress, and Renoir's future wife, among others, share this moment of la vie moderne. {448 pages - Fiction}

The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel [Added 12/08]
by Debra Dean. Marina, an elderly Russian woman now living in the US, recalls her youth in war-torn Leningrad during the German siege of 1941 when as museum tour guide she joined other staff members in trying to save the museum’s priceless masterpieces. {256 pages -Fiction}

Mansfield Park [Added 11/07]
By Jane Austen. At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among the family of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in the chilly grandeur of Mansfield Park. There she accepts her lowly status, and gradually falls in love with her cousin Edmund, in Austen’s classic novel. {454 pages - Fiction}

Mary Modern [Added 12/08]
by Camille DeAngelis. "Using a bloodstained scrap of an apron found in the attic, Lucy Morrigan, a young genetic researcher, successfully clones her grandmother Mary. But rather than conjuring a new baby, Lucy brings to life a twenty-two-year-old Mary, who is confused and disoriented when she finds herself ... alive in a home that is no longer her own, surrounded by reminders of a life she has already lived but doesn't remember." {368 pages - Fiction}

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter [Added 11/06]
by Kim Edwards. When bad weather keeps Norah from giving birth to twins at the hospital, her husband decides to give the second baby, a girl with Down syndrome, to his nurse. While ultimately hopeful, this novel tells much of the dark side of human understanding and relationships. {401 pages - Fiction}

Monique in the Mango Rains: Two Years With a Midwife in Mali [Added 12/08]
by Kris Holloway. What is it like to live and work in a remote corner of the world and befriend a courageous midwife who breaks traditional roles? This is the inspiring true story of Monique Dembele, an accidental midwife who became a legend, and Kris Holloway, the young Peace Corps volunteer who became her closest confidante. {240 pages - Nonfiction}

Mountains Beyond Mountains [Added 11/07]
By Tracy Kidder. Paul Farmer--doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant—found his life’s calling in medical school: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. {301 pages - Nonfiction}

My Sister’s Keeper
by Jodi Picoult. Anna was genetically engineered to be a match for her cancer-ridden older sister, but she rebels against becoming the kidney donor who will save her sister’s life. {423 pages - Fiction}

The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri. The Ganguli family leaves their tradition-bound life in Calcutta to settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts in this exploration of expectations and realities of immigrant life. {291 pages - Fiction}

Nineteen Minutes [Added 12/08]
by Jodi Picoult. Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens--until a student enters the local high school with an arsenal of guns and starts shooting, changing the lives of everyone inside and out. The daughter of the judge sitting on the case is the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened in front of her own eyes. Or can she? {480 pages - Fiction}

No I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club [Added 12/08]
by Virginia Ironside. Marie Sharp is heading toward sixty, and after the excitement of the freewheeling sixties, she’s ready to settle into a quiet, blissfully boring routine. No book clubs, Italian classes gym memberships or bicycle trips across Europe, Thank you very much! {231 pages - Fiction}

One Thousand White Women
by Jim Fergus. Based on an actual historical event, the story of a young woman, who in 1875, travels to the American West to marry Little Wolf, the chief of the Cheyenne nation is told in diary and letter form. {302 pages - Fiction}

Out Stealing Horses [Added 12/08]
by Per Petterson. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond Sander lives secluded in a far corner of Norway. Casting his mind back to 1948, he recalls a horse stealing prank with his best friend that turned tragic and changed his life forever. {256 pages - Fiction}

Peace Like a River
by Leif Enger. Eleven-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy who is keenly aware of the gift of breath, journeys in the 1960’s with his family to find his older brother. Their search of the North Dakota Badlands takes Rube on an unforgettable journey riddled with outlaw tales, heartfelt insights, and miracles. {311 pages - Fiction}

Plum Wine [Added 12/08]
by Angela Davis-Gardner. Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960’s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies, leaving her a tansu of homemade plum wine wrapped in rice paper. {352 pages - Fiction}

Pope Joan
by Donna Cross. For a thousand years men have denied her existence--Pope Joan, the woman who disguised herself as a man and rose to rule Christianity for two years. This novel animates the legend with a portrait of an unforgettable woman who struggles against restrictions her soul cannot accept. {422 pages - Fiction}

Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
by Terry Ryan. The mother of ten children keeps poverty at bay by winning contests, in this true story of persistence and humor. {351 pages - Nonfiction}

Reading Lolita in Tehran
by Azar Nafisi. A professor invites seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. The women meet in secret, since the books they read were officially banned by the Iranian government. The meetings become a springboard for debating social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. {347 pages - Biography}

The Red Tent
by Anita Diamant. In a story based on the Book of Genesis, Jacob’s only daughter, Dinah, through a hard-working youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land, shares her unique perspectives on the origins of many of our modern religious practices and sexual politics, eager to impart the lessons in endurance and humanity she has learned from her father’s wives. {321 pages - Fiction}

Rosewater and Soda Bread: A Novel [Added 12/08]
by Marsha Mehran. More than a year has passed since Marjan, Bahar and Layla, the beautiful Iranian Aminpour sisters, sought refuge in the quaint Irish town of Ballinacroagh, and opened up a Persian Café. When a young woman washes up on Clew Bay Beach, the sisters’ worlds is once again turned upside down. {290 pages - Fiction}

Saving the World [Added 11/07]
By Julia Alvarez. While Alma Huebert is researching a new novel, she finds her real story—and her salvation—in a little-known but staggering historical footnote: the Royal Expedition of the Vaccine. In 1803, Don Francisco Balmis embarked on a two-year sea voyage to rescue the New World from smallpox. Accompanying him were twenty-two orphan boys, acting as live carriers, and their guardian, Isabel Sendales y Gómez. As Alma digs deeper into Isabel's life, she finds her own power to commit an act as life-changing as Isabel's. {363 pages - Fiction}

The Sea [Added 11/06]
by John Banville. Middle aged Max Morden mourns deeply the loss of his wife Anna. To escape overwhelming memories, Max retreats to the Cedars, a house that was the summer home of a family who strongly influenced him when he was a child. Max is morbid and melancholy as he mourns his loss and cannot cope with it. His daughter can see his angst but has no concept on how to return her dad to the living. This contemplative novel on memory won the Booker Prize. {195 pages - Fiction}

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan [Added 11/07]
By Lisa See. In nineteenth-century China, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. {258 pages - Fiction}

Songs of the Gorilla Nation [Added 11/06]
by Dawn Prince-Hughes. By observing and interacting with gorillas, the author learned how to manage Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. A fascinating and revealing memoir which gives insights into autism and into the human-animal connection. {224 pages - Nonfiction}

Space Between Us [Added 12/08]
by Thrity Umrigar. Each morning, Bhima, a domestic servant in contemporary Bombay, India, leaves her own small shanty in the slums to tend another woman’s house. In Sera Dubash’s home, Bhima scrubs the floors of a house in which she remains an outsider. Despite being separated from each other by blood and class, she and Sera find themselves bound by gender and shared life experiences. {320 Pages - Fiction}

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel [Added 12/08]
by David Wroblewski. Edgar, a speech-disabled, Wisconsin youth, bonds with three yearling canines while he struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death. {576 pages - Fiction}

Stuffed
by Patricia Volk. A humorous, entertaining true story of life in a New York restaurant family. Volk devotes individual chapters to the stories of her family members, including her great-grandfather who brought pastrami to the New World. {239 pages - Nonfiction}

A Sudden Country [Added 11/06]
by Karen Fisher. Lucy Mitchell, a widow, remarries and resents the decision of her second husband, Israel Mitchell, to emigrate. James McLaren is a Scottish trapper who loses his children to smallpox and his Nez Perce wife to another trapper. He signs on to guide Mitchell’s little band on their trek from the Iowa banks of the Missouri to the Columbia River in Oregon. This is a novel of the American West. {366 pages - Fiction}

Suite Francaise [Added 11/07]
By Irene Nemirovsky. Beginning in Paris on the eve of the Nazi occupation in 1940, this book tells the remarkable story of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control. As Parisians flee the city, human folly surfaces in every imaginable way: a wealthy mother searches for sweets in a town without food; a couple is terrified at the thought of losing their jobs as their world begins to fall apart. Moving on to a provincial village now occupied by German soldiers, the locals must learn to coexist with the enemy—in their town, their homes, even in their hearts. {367 pages - Fiction}

Tales From the Town of Widows [Added 12/08]
by James Cañon. One Sunday morning, a band of guerrillas comes to Mariquita and takes all the men away. Without men, the small Colombian mountain village becomes a sinking wasteland filled with women until Rosalba declares herself magistrate and creates a utopia far greater than any revolutionary’s imagined ideal society. {337 Pages - Fiction}

The Tenderness of Wolves [Added 12/08]
by Stef Penney. Winter has just tightened its grip in Canada's Northern Territory in 1867, when a man is brutally murdered. A variety of outsiders are drawn to the crime and to the township--but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it? {371 pages - Fiction}

The Thirteenth Tale [Added 12/08]
by Diane Setterfield. A compelling emotional mystery about family secrets and the magic of books and storytelling. A dying writer bids a young bookshop assistant to write her biography. {432 pages - Fiction}

Three Cups of Tea; One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time [Added 11/07]
By Greg Mortenson. The author, following a 1993 climb of Pakistan’s treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schools—especially for girls—that offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit. (331 pages - Nonfiction)

The Time Traveler’s Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger. Henry De Tamble is a Chicago librarian with "Chrono Displacement" disorder; at random times, he suddenly disappears without warning and finds himself in the past or future, usually at a time or place of importance in his life. This leads to some wonderful and frustrating occasions, for Henry to meet his wife, Clare. {537 pages - Fiction}

The Tipping Point [Added 7/09]
by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell defines that precise moment when a trend becomes a trend, and probes the surface of everyday occurrences to reveal some surprising dynamics behind explosive social changes. He examines the power of word-of-mouth and explores how very small changes can directly affect popularity. {279 pages - Non-Fiction}

Truck: A Love Story
By Michael Perry. “All I wanted to do was fix my old pickup truck," says Michael Perry. "That, and plant my garden. Then I met this woman. . . ." Truck: A Love Story recounts a year in which Perry struggles to grow his own food, live peaceably with his neighbors, and sort out his love life. But along the way, he sets his hair on fire, is attacked by wild turkeys, takes a date to the fire department chicken dinner, and proposes marriage to a woman in New Orleans. {277 pages - Nonfiction}

The Uncommon Reader [Added 12/08]
by Alan Bennett. The Uncommon reader is none other than Her Majesty the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely and comes to question the prescribed order of the world. {128 pages - Fiction}

Water for Elephants
By Sara Gruen. As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there that he met Marlena, the beautiful equestrian star married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. And he met Rosie, an untrainable elephant who was the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. The bond that grew among this unlikely trio was one of love and trust, and, ultimately, it was their only hope for survival. {331 pages - Fiction}

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Titles & Annotations for Adults

Pierce County Library SystemInformation & Imagination

Reading/Books

Titles & Annotations for Adults

Pierce County Library System
Information & Imagination