Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Deeply sensuous and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite. Isabella Swan's move to Forks, a small, perpetually rainy town in Washington, could have been the most boring move she ever made. But once she meets the mysterious and alluring Edward Cullen, Isabella's life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn.... (more)

The Magdalen Martyrs

by Ken Bruen

Jack Taylor is walking the delicate edge of a sobriety he doesn't trust when his phone rings. He's in debt to a Galway tough named Bill Cassell, what the locals call a "hard man." Bill did Jack a big favor a while back; the trouble is, he never lets a favor go unreturned. Jack is amazed when Cassell simply asks him to track down a woman, now either dead or very old, who long ago helped his mother escape from the... (more)

Speak

by Laurie Halse Anderson

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won't talk to her, and people she doesn't even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that's not safe. Because there's something she's trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to... (more)

Willful Creatures

by Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender’s Willful Creatures conjures a fantastical world in which authentic love blooms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a woman’s children are potatoes, and a little boy with an iron for a head is born to a family of pumpkin heads. With her singular mix of surrealism, musical prose, and keenly felt emotion, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the... (more)

Death's Jest-Book

by Reginald Hill

Sometimes a monster can hide behind a mask of civilized, urbane intelligence. Sometimes the most terrible of crimes can go undetected and unpunished. Sometimes Death has a wicked sense of humor ...

SQL For Dummies (Sql for Dummies)

by Allen G. Taylor

See how SQL interfaces with today's environments Start building and using relational databases with SQL's newest features The database may be the twenty-first century filing cabinet, but building one is a little more complex than sliding drawers into a metal box. With this book to guide you through all the newest features of SQL, you'll soon be whipping up relational databases, using SQL... (more)

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel

by Vendela Vida

On the day of her father's funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa Iverton discovers that he wasn't her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, and now Clarissa is alone and adrift. The one person she feels she can trust, her fiancé, Pankaj, has just revealed a terrible and life-changing secret to her. In the cycle of a day, all the truths in Clarissa's world become myths and... (more)

Homecoming (Tillerman Series)

by Cynthia Voigt

"IT'S STILL TRUE." That's the first thing James Tillerman says to his sister Dicey every morning. It's still true that their mother has abandoned the four Tillerman children somewhere in the middle of Connecticut. It's still true they have to find their way, somehow, to Great-aunt Cilla's house in Bridgeport, which may be their only hope of staying together as a family. But when they get to Bridgeport, they... (more)

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman

by Bruce Robinson

Meet thirteen-year-old Thomas Penman. Growing up in a bizarre household of eccentrics, including a mother and father who wage a silent war against each other. Thomas downs his first drink, smokes his first cigarette, pursues the beautiful Gwendolin Hackett--all the while forming a special bond with his beloved, ailing Grandpa Walker, a World War II veteran prone to dark habits. An obsessive snooper, Thomas... (more)

Enticed

by Virginia Henley

After a seduction leads to romance, beautiful gypsy Kitty Rooney sets off from Ireland for America after Patrick O'Reilly, a wealthy heir, and ends up in a kidnapper's arms. Originally published as The Irish Gypsy. Reprint.

The Odd Sea

by Frederick Reiken

A teenage boy is missing. His younger brother searches for him and in the process finds himself. A “haunting first novel that takes a horrifying family calamity and turns it into a form of magic” (New York Times Book Review).

Daylight

by Elizabeth Knox

Brian “Bad” Phelan, a New Zealand policeman and bomb disposal expert, likes to live dangerously. Bad is an expert climber and caver and, while on vacation on the French/Italian border, he helps bring a body out of a rocky, wave-swept cove. Curiously, the dead woman bears striking similarities to a young woman he met years ago, shortly before she disappeared in a flooded French cave. Haunted by the strange... (more)

Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening

Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening

by Stephen Kuusisto

A memoir of blindness and listening rendered with a poet's delight by the author of the acclaimed Planet of the Blind . Blind people are not casual listeners. Blind since birth, Stephen Kuusisto recounts with a poet's sense of detail the surprise that comes when we are actively listening to our surroundings. There is an art to eavesdropping. Like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood or Dorothy Allison's One... (more)

Mercury: A Novel

by Cary C. Holladay

On a Saturday night three teenagers break into an abandoned neon factory and are fascinated by a vat of mercury glistening in the half-light. They play with the strange, silvery substance, coating their arms and cigarettes with it. For Katelynn, the poisoning is swift and debilitating. For one of her companions, it is a death sentence. While slowly recovering from mercury poisoning, Katelynn witnesses the... (more)

The Drowning Room

by Michael Pye

A blend of history, love story, and memoir, this novel set in 1642 recounts the story of Gretje Reyniers, a moneylender, pelt dealer, and town prostitute, who rises to fame and fortune in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. Reprint. NYT.

Madonna of the Apes (Art Mysteries)

by Nicholas Kilmer

Fred Taylor, a veteran of unspecified clandestine services that have caused him to spend hard times in Southeast Asia, finds himself at loose ends in Boston. A late-night chance encounter in the city's Beacon Hill area throws his lot in with eccentric art collector Clayton Reed. Reed has been tricked by a young man as unscrupulous as he is ignorant into examining and considering for purchase a collection of... (more)

You Don't Know Me

by David Klass

You think you know John? Well, let's see . . . What bathroom fixture did his father have in mind at his birth? Does algebra have a use, besides torture? Who is Glory Halle-lujah? Who is Violent Hayes? What do they want? Who or what are the Lashasa Palulu? Why do fools fall in love? How can anyone who is fighting a secret battle for his life know anyone? And how can they know him?

Coffins

by Rodman Philbrick

THE FROZEN BABY Physician Davis Bentwood, making a lengthy housecall at the Coffin family mansion on the coast of Maine, finds the newborn grandson of Captain Cash Coffin, stiff and cold as a block of ice, in a cradle not ten feet from a roaring fire. Young Davis can find no medical explanation for the baby's death. After a mysterious accident at the family shipyard caused the simultaneous death of his twin... (more)

Ordinary Monsters

by Karen Novak

A mother's search for her lost son leads her to an almost mythical California desert town. Nestled in a hidden valley, Lágrimas is the last stop for a host of eccentric and questionable souls. When Joyce arrives looking for her son on a tip from a hitchhiker who claims to have seen him there, she settles in a bit too quickly for the locals' comfort. Much to her crushing disappointment, the boy she's been led to... (more)

The Slynx (New York Review Books Classics)

The Slynx (New York Review Books Classics)

by Tat?i?a?na Tolstai?a?

New in Paperback “A postmodern literary masterpiece.” – The Times Literary Supplement Two hundred years after civilization ended in an event known as the Blast, Benedikt isn’t one to complain. He’s got a job—transcribing old books and presenting them as the words of the great new leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe—and though he doesn’t enjoy the privileged status of a Murza, at least he’s not a serf or a... (more)

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by Stephenie Meyer