By Wallace Stegner

“This long, thoughtful novel about a retired historian who researches and writes about his pioneer grandparents garnered Stegner a Pulitzer Prize (Publishers Weekly).”

By Dai Sijie

At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” When the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation their re-education takes a most surprising turn.

By Jane Green

Eccentric widow Nan rents rooms for the summer in her Nantucket home when she discovers her finances are running low. As the house comes alive again, Nan finds her family expanding.

By Lisa Unger

A young New York writer, a privileged daughter of a doting father and a loving mother does a good deed which has terrible consequences and leaves her running for her life.

By Ann Patchett

When terrorists seize hostages at an embassy party, an unlikely assortment of people are thrown together, including American opera star Roxanne Coss, and Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese CEO and her biggest fan.

By John Shors

This "passionate, lush, and dramatic" novel reveals the story behind the building of the Taj Mahal and the destruction of a royal family.

By Anna Quindlen

For 18 years Fran Benedetto kept her secret and hid her bruises. She stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father, and because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son's face, Fran finally made a choice--and ran for both their lives.

By C.J. Box

A twelve-year-old girl and her younger brother are on the run in the Idaho woods, pursued by four men they have just watched commit murder.

By Marcus Zuzak
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Wednesday, January 27, 2010.  7 PM.

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel - a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

By Stephanie Kallos
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Clare Badke, Principal Account Clerk, Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director, Adrienne Rein, Library Clerk

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.

By Abraham Verghese
Recommended By Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk

Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.

By Laurie Fabiano

A multigenerational saga that opens in an Italian village in the 1900s and then crosses the ocean to New York's Lower East Side to tell the dramatic story of the heroine, Giovanna, and how she triumphs over tragedy.

By Jesse Kellerman

In this thriller, a graduate student recently kicked out of their shared apartment by his girlfriend, answers a want ad for a “Conversationalist.” And so he meets a woman who, with her old-world ways and razor-sharp mind, is his intellectual soul mate.

By Joanne Harris

Returning to the small Loire village of her childhood to run a cafe, Franboise Dartigen soon finds that hidden among her mother's recipes are clues that will lead her to the truth of long ago.

By Gaynor Arnold

A heart-warming story of first love: a cocky young writer is smitten by a pretty girl in a blue dress.

By Jeannette Walls

From the author of The Glass Castle, a true-life novel about Walls' grandmother--horse trainer, teacher, flapper, rancher, and pilot.

By Kathryn Stockett
Recommended By Isabel Zinman, Readers' Services Librarian, Megan Kass, Systems Manager

Skeeter returns home to Mississippi from college in 1962 and begins to write stories about the African-American women that are found working in white households, which includes Aibileen, who grieves for the loss of her son while caring for her seventeenth white child, and Minny, Aibileen's sassy friend, the hired cook for a secretive woman who is new to town.

By Lisa Gardner
Series Detective D.D. Warren Novels
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

While on the trail of a twisted serial killer, Detective Dodge must track down a woman from his past who may be every bit as dangerous as the killer.

By Harry Bernstein

A moving tale about working class life set in early 1900’s England and the boundaries that can be overcome by love.

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. The women welcome her and reveal their own personal stories of loss, love, and hope.

By Émile Zola

The story of how the first department stores in nineteenth-century Paris made shopping into a religion, and of the love between enterprising store owner Octave Mouret and the rags-to-riches heroine Denise Baudu.

By Nancy Horan

A fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first marriage.

By David Dosa
Recommended By Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk, Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

 “Making Rounds with Oscar is the story of an unusual cat, the patients he serves, their caregivers, and of one doctor who learned how to listen. Heartfelt, inspiring, and full of humor and pathos, this book allows readers to take a walk into a world rarely seen from the outside, a world we often misunderstand (From the Publisher).”

By Alan Brennert
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

Tracks the poignant struggle of a Hawaiian woman who contracts leprosy as a child in Honolulu during the 1890s and is deported to the island of Moloka'i, where she grows to adulthood at the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa.

By Ann Brashares

Life after life, crossing continents and dynasties, Daniel and Sophia (despite her changing name and form) have been drawn together-and he remembers it all.

By Barbara Delinsky
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

“The emotional ties between mothers and daughters are stretched to breaking in this emotionally wrenching story of love and forgiveness. Once again, Barbara Delinsky has given us a powerful novel, one that asks a central question: What does it take to be a good mother (From the Publisher).”

By Jennifer Cody Epstein

A fictional portrait of Pan Yuliang, a real-life 20th-century Chinese prostitute turned successful artist. It is the story of a woman forced to choose between following her heart and pursuing her art.

By Robert Goolrick
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

“Robert Goolrick's intoxicating debut novel delivers a classic tale of suspenseful seduction, set in a world that seems to have gone temporarily off its axis (From the Publisher).”

By Nancy Pickard

"With exquisite sensitivity, Edgar–finalist Pickard probes a smoldering cold case involving the Linders, a cattle ranching family that's ruled the small, tight–knit community of Rose, Kans., for generations. One stormy night in 1986, someone shoots Hugh–Jay Linder dead, and Laurie, his discontented young wife, disappears (From Publishers Weekly)."

By Claire Cook
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

After being left alone to raise young daughter for seven years, Jill's husband Seth re-enters her life after seven years asking for forgiveness.

By DeVa Gantt

Charmaine Ryan knows only poverty and pain growing up. In the wake of a horrifying tragedy, she seeks a new life, and fate leads her into the private world of the wealthy Duvoisin clan.

By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

For the Chatterjees, an upper-caste Calcutta family fallen on hard times but tenaciously remain in their decaying mansion of mystery and faded glory, using storytelling from generation to generation as a lifeline.

By Laura Cunningham

A humorous memoir about growing up in an extremely unusual Bronx household in the 1950s.

By David Guterson

In 1954, a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned at San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder.

By Thrity Umrigar

Set in modern-day India, it is the story of Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife and Bhima, who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years.

By Jennifer Donnolly
Series Tea Rose Trilogy

London, 1888: a young woman dares to dream of a life beyond tumbledown wharves, gas lit alleys and the grim, crumbling dwellings of the poor.

By Chris Grabenstein
Series John Creepak Mysteries
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

When a billionaire real estate tycoon is found murdered on the Tilt-A-Whirl at a seedy seaside amusement park in the summer tourist town of Sea Haven. John Ceepak, a former MP just back from Iraq heads the investigation.

By David Sedaris
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

A collection of essays celebrates the foibles of the author’s everyday life in France and America, from an attempt to make coffee with water from a flower vase to a drug purchase in a North Carolina mobile home 

By Hilary Mantel
Series Wolf Hall Trilogy
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Assuming the power recently lost by the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell counsels a mercurial Henry VIII on the latter's efforts to marry Anne Boleyn against the wishes of Rome, a successful endeavor that comes with a dangerous price.

By T.C. Boyle

A story of women who invest everything, at great risk, in that mysterious "bank of feeling" named Frank Lloyd Wright.