Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Gift of Rain [GIFT OF RAIN]

by Tan Twan(Author) Eng

This inspiring debut novel by a female former professional jockey and horse trainer tells the moving tale of Willow King, a colt born with crooked legs, who is saved from destruction by 13-year-old Katie Durham. Because one of Katie's own legs is shorter than the other, she feels an immediate kinship with the imperfect little colt. With painstaking care, she pulls King through arduous training until he becomes a... (more)

Hercule Poirot: Book 1

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

by Agatha Christie

The heiress of Styles has been murdered, dying in agony from strychnine slipped into her coffee. And there are plenty who would gain from her death: the financially strapped stepson, the gold digging younger husband, and an embittered daughter-in-law. Agatha Christie's eccentric and hugely popular detective, Hercule Poirot, was introduced to the world in this book, which launched her career as the most famous... (more)

Maynard & Jennica

by Rudolph Delson

A wildly original debut, Maynard & Jennica weaves together dozens of voices to give us an unforgettable love story, a hilarious urban comedy, a page-turning literary mystery, and a portrait of our times. Maynard Gogarty is a defeated musician, a reformed misanthrope who makes a hobby of surreptitiously filming the fashion faux pas of New York City commuters. On an uptown 6 train in the sweltering summer... (more)

Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell's epic novel of love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to give rise to two authorized sequels and one of the most popular and celebrated movies of all time. Many novels have been written about the Civil War and its aftermath. None take us into the burning fields and cities of the American South as Gone With the Wind does, creating haunting scenes and thrilling portraits of characters... (more)

The English American

by Alison Larkin

When Pippa Dunn,adopted as an infant and raised terribly British, discovers that her birth parents are from the American South, she finds that "culture clash" has layers of meaning she'd never imagined. Meet The English American , a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut novel that sprang from Larkin's autobiographical one-woman show of the same name. In many ways, Pippa Dunn is very English: she eats Marmite on... (more)

One More Year: Stories

by Sana Krasikov

Every so often a new writer appears who is wiser than her years would suggest, whose flesh-and-blood characters embody more experience than a young writer could possible know. Sana Krasikov is one of those writers. Her first published story appeared in the New Yorker, her second in The Atlantic Monthly’s fiction issue. One More Year is her debut collection, made up of stories of people who hold out hope,... (more)

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by C. Alan Bradley

In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950—and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia’s family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a... (more)

Child of Fire

by Harry Connolly

Ray Lilly is living on borrowed time. He’s the driver for Annalise Powliss, a high-ranking member of the Twenty Palace Society, a group of sorcerers devoted to hunting down and executing rogue magicians. But because Ray betrayed her once, Annalise is looking for an excuse to kill him–or let someone else do the job. Unfortunately for both of them, Annalise’s next mission goes wrong, leaving her critically injured.... (more)

In the Forest at Midnight

by Rita Pratt Smith

This impressive first novel chronicling a woman's coming-of-age combines delicately tangible detail--the hues, tones and flavors of India--with a well-crafted knot of relationships from which narrator Megan Manning grasps the threads of her own future. Megan's childhood in Madras, toward the end of British rule, is stamped by her family's tragic reaction to a forbidden marriage between Megan's Aunt Letty and an... (more)

Piercing the Veil

by Eric Wentz

In 1941 the precursor to the OSS and the CIA combined with British SAS to produce an elite fighting force whose mission was to carry out subversion against the fascist regimes of Europe ? a subversion that continues to resonate in the contemporary world. The fascism then re-emerges in the Islamist extremism and heretical Christian occultism of today. A warrior with the constitutional forbearance of a diamond and... (more)

Stolen

by Lucy Christopher

"It happened like this. I was stolen from an airport. Taken from everything I knew,everything I was used to. Taken to sand and heat, dirt and danger. And he expected me to love him. This is my story. A letter from nowhere." Stolen, by Lucy Christopher, is a truly incredible novel. Set in the Great Sandy Desert, in the harshly beautiful Australian outback, it is essentially the record of a kidnapping... (more)

Scars on the Face of God: The Devil's Bible

Scars on the Face of God: The Devil's Bible

by C. G. Bauer

Hex signs protect every barn and outbuilding. The local tannery spews its poison on the land and in the river. And babies disappear at birth. An orphan and one-time felon who earned his nickname "from the sound a crowbar makes when it hits a man's head," Johannes "Wump" Hozer is now the custodian of Our Lady of the Innocents parish in Three Bridges, PA. Wump is old and tired. He's fought all his life... (more)

Heads Deacon, Tails Devil (P.J. McCalla Novels)

The P. J. McCalla Series: Book 1

Heads Deacon, Tails Devil (P.J. McCalla Novels)

by P.J. Mccalla

Set in a small town in the early 1900's, Heads Deacon Tails Devil is the story of Robert Grant, an elementary school teacher and long-standing deacon and spirit-stirring soloist at Nazarene Baptist Church, who shows his best side to his adoring, unsuspecting public, but is the devil incarnate at home. Rachel Grant, who, as a young woman, married Robert against her mother's advice and was sorry for it from her... (more)

The Wish Maker

by Ali Sethi

by Karen Andrea

After years of being shunted between homes, Max Milford is sick of all the constant changes. But when his grandfather finally shows up and rescues him from the children's home, Max gets much more than just another foster family. In an out-of-bounds room at grandpa's house, he discovers a long deserted library of animated books, filled with magic. The place seems harmless enough at first, yet soon has Max falling... (more)

Blood on His Hands

by Mark P. Sadler

Michael Renton s life seemed to end the moment he pulled the trigger sending his unfaithful wife and her lover into oblivion. On the lam, his journey takes him from rural Oklahoma to the glitz of Las Vegas. He had not however, anticipated the determined tenacity of private investigator Ian Walker, who tracks him down to northern Georgia on to the Appalachian Trail just outside of the sleepy hamlet of Helen. ... (more)

I Do Not Come to You by Chance

by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani

A deeply moving debut novel set amid the perilous world of Nigerian email scams, I Do Not Come to You by Chance tells the story of one young man and the family who loves him. Being the opera of the family, Kingsley Ibe is entitled to certain privileges--a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation from university. As first son, he has responsibilities, too. But times are bad... (more)

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by Pat Bertram