Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Banned Books - Adults
OBD Oprah's Book Club - Adult
Right to Read (WPL-ADULT)
Right to Read: Banned Books
OBD Oprah's Book Club - Adult
Right to Read (WPL-ADULT)
Right to Read: Banned Books
Description
From the author of, A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man returns to 1940s Cajun, he visits and forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. Best Books for Young Teen Readers. In the 1940s in rural Louisiana,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State -- and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little...
3) The reader
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg suffering from acute hepatitis stays at home, reads and wanders. He meets Hanna, a street car conductor and a relationship develops. Her dark past forces her to leave him. Years later her secrets are revealed and Michael struggles with the beautiful woman he knew and the horror he encounters.
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Summer Reading - Read Outside Your Comfort Zone: Frequently Challenged Books
Adult - National Library Week
ALA Most Challenged Books
More Lists...
Adult - National Library Week
ALA Most Challenged Books
More Lists...
Description
Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Anita Shreve's hauntingly beautiful #1 bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection about tragedy, grief, betrayal, and the 'impossibility of knowing another person.'
As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to expect both intense exhilaration and long periods alone, but nothing has prepared her for a late-night knock that lets her know her husband has died in a crash.
Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary:...
As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to expect both intense exhilaration and long periods alone, but nothing has prepared her for a late-night knock that lets her know her husband has died in a crash.
Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary:...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Best Adult Fiction & Nonfiction (SCPL)
2023 Eisenhower Staff Favorites
2024 Tournament of Books
More Lists...
2023 Eisenhower Staff Favorites
2024 Tournament of Books
More Lists...
Description
"William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it's a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace--there is some question if it was rape--sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow. By the author of What I Lived For.
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Read Widely: North America & The Caribbean
2024 Feb. Black History Month
Adult - Black History Month
More Lists...
2024 Feb. Black History Month
Adult - Black History Month
More Lists...
Description
"Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood-where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned-Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl,...
10) The good earth
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
When O-lan, a servant girl, marries the peasant Wang Lung, she toils tirelessly through four pregnancies for their family's survival. Reward at first is meagre, but there is sustenance in the land - until the famine comes. Half-starved, the family joins thousands of peasants to beg on the city streets. It seems that all is lost, until O-lan's desperate will to survive returns them home with undreamt of wealth. But they have betrayed the earth from...
11) East of Eden
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Classics - St. Charles Public Library
Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
More Lists...
Coming-of-age
Eisenhower Public Library Staff Picks: Literary Fiction
More Lists...
Description
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
12) Demon Copperhead
Author
Series
Oprah's book club volume 2022
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Read Widely: North America & The Caribbean
And the Winner Is.... - Adult
Best of 2022
More Lists...
And the Winner Is.... - Adult
Best of 2022
More Lists...
Formats
Description
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing...
13) The road
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
A searing, postapocalyptic novel... A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray . The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the...
14) American dirt
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Read Widely: North America & The Caribbean
Book Club Bags @ Messenger
Book Club Books
More Lists...
Book Club Bags @ Messenger
Book Club Books
More Lists...
Description
"Tambien de este lado hay sue?os. Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
2023 Best Adult Fiction & Nonfiction (SCPL)
Black Voices in Fiction (adults)
Celebrity Book Clubs
More Lists...
Black Voices in Fiction (adults)
Celebrity Book Clubs
More Lists...
Description
"Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long...
16) BLACK AND BLUE
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A nurse escapes her abusive husband, a New York policeman, taking their son with her to Florida. She assumes a new identity and even finds romance, but there is a price, the 10-year-old boy misses his father and she lives in constant fear the father will find them, which he does. The novel analyzes why abused women wait so long to make their break.
17) Jack
Author
Series
Gilead novels volume 4
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Marilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowa--the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack--and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson's fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead's Presbyterian minister, and his...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
The drama of a U.S. missionary family in Africa during a war of decolonization. At its center is Nathan Price, a self-righteous Baptist minister who establishes a mission in a village in 1959 Belgian Congo. The resulting clash of cultures is seen through the eyes of his wife and his four daughters. By the author of Pigs in Heaven.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Suggest a purchase. Submit Request