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Titles & Annotations for Adults
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 page)
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)
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)
Caramelo [Added 11/06]
by Sandra Cisneros. The multigenerational 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)
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)
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)
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)
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon. Teenaged Christopher Boone is autistic, and takes everything he sees or is told at face value. When a neighbor’s dog is killed, Christopher decides to find out who did it, and writes a book about his investigation. A fascinating and poignant read. (226 pages)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
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)
Liar's Club
by Mary Karr. An unsettling, painful, yet laugh-out-loud memoir of a young girl's childhood in East Texas, a world she inhabits with her sister and their alcoholic parents (the mother is also mentally ill). Winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 407 pages.
Life of Pi
by Yann Martel. Pi is a boy who finds himself cast adrift in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. A funny and highly original adventure story, this book is also a meditation on what it takes to be human. (326 pages)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
by Alexander McCall Smith. The engaging Precious Ramotswe sets up a detective agency in order to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon opening her small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. This affirming story captures the landscape and people of Botswana. (235 pages)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)