Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Lissy Jablonski was fifteen during the summer of 1985. That was the summer her father, a soft-spoken gynecologist, up and left her mother for a redheaded bank teller. The same summer Lissy and her mother disappeared from their quiet New Hampshire lives to have an adventure of their own amid a cast of unlikely characters, including a Valium-addicted ex-debutante and a suspected mobster. The summer the reliably... (more)

The White Bone: A Novel

by Barbara Gowdy

A thrilling journey into the minds of African elephants as they struggle to survive. If, as many recent nonfiction bestsellers have revealed, animals possess emotions and awareness, they must also have stories. In The White Bone , a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants, Barbara Gowdy creates a world whole and separate that yet illuminates our own. For years, young Mud and her... (more)

My Old Sweetheart (Contemporary American Fiction)

My Old Sweetheart (Contemporary American Fiction)

by Susanna Moore

"Susanna Moore's novel astonished me--one of those brilliant objects that come along only rarely, all light on clear water, and then one realizes the faster currents underneath, the terrible swiftness of sex and time. " --Joan Didion In this mesmerizing novel, Susanna Moore displays a naturalist's eye for the landscape of her native Hawaii and an uncanny sensitivity to the despairing love between mothers and... (more)

The Cement Garden

by Ian McEwan

In this tour de force of psychological unease--now a major motion picture starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Sinead Cusack--McEwan excavates the ruins of childhood and uncovers things that most adults have spent a lifetime forgetting--or denying. "Possesses the suspense and chilling impact of Lord of the Flies."--Washington Post Book World.

Blackwater

by Kerstin Ekman

On Midsummer's Eve, 1974, Annie Raft arrives with her daughter Mia in the remote Swedish village of Blackwater to join her lover Dan on a nearby commune. On her journey through the deep forest, she sumbles upon the site of a grisly double murder--a crime that will remain unsolved for nearly twenty years, until the day Annie sees her grown daughter in the arms of one man she glimpsed in the forest that eerie... (more)

Your Blues Ain't Like Mine: A Novel

by Bebe Moore Campbell

"ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING." --San Francisco Chronicle "TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "REMARKABLE...POWERFUL." --Time "YOUR BLUES... (more)

Magic Time: A Novel

by Doug Marlette

A prize-winning Southern master storyteller weaves a riveting tale of love, mystery and justice When the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Doug Marlette last turned to fiction, Valerie Sayers rejoiced in The Washington Post Book World : “ The Bridge <is> a great story—exuberant, proud, myth-challenging—and Marlette has a great, Dickensian time with the telling.” Pat Conroy saluted The Bridge as the... (more)

Soul Kiss

by Shay Youngblood

The "intelligent and erotic" debut novel ( Washington Post ) by the author of the new hardcover, Black Girl in Paris "Hauntingly beautiful...vibrantly alive...calls to mind Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ."- Boston Herald

Mama

by Terry McMillan

The explosive novel that introduced #1 New York Times bestselling author Terry McMillan-now in a new trade edition.

The Cigarette Girl: A Novel

by Carol Wolper

A furiously funny, clear-eyed novel about a non-bimbo's dating adventures in a town that celebrates bimbosity. Elizabeth West is twenty-eight, which means she's just entered The Zone--that seven-year span in a woman's life when the pressure to find Mr. Right is at its most intense. For Elizabeth, however, the quest is not about Mr. Right so much as it is about Mr. Maybe. And on some nights, all she's looking... (more)

The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

A police lieutenant with the elite "Red Dogs" until she retired at twenty-nine , Aud Torvigen is a rangy six-footer with eyes the color of cement and a tendency to hurt people who get in her way. Born in Norway into the failed marriage between a Scandinavian diplomat and an American businessman, she now makes Atlanta her home, luxuriating in the lush heat and brashness of the New South. She glides easily between... (more)

Deliverance

by James Dickey

Released for the first time in trade paperback, this is the classic tale of four men caught in a primitive and violent test of manhood. The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror,... (more)

Once Were Warriors (Vintage International)

Once Were Warriors (Vintage International)

by Alan Duff

Once Were Warriors is Alan Duff's harrowing vision of his country's indigenous people two hundred years after the English conquest. In prose that is both raw and compelling, it tells the story of Beth Heke, a Maori woman struggling to keep her family from falling apart, despite the squalor and violence of the housing projects in which they live. Conveying both the rich textures of Maori tradition and the wounds... (more)

Crazy in Alabama

by Mark Childress

Meet Peter Joseph, aka Peejoe, a wide-eyed believer in the unbelievable, raised by his Meemaw in Pigeon Creek for a good part of his life. But it was his aunt Lucille who raised him for the better. And it all happened during that summer everyone was driven crazy in Alabama, with Lucille at the wheel. It's 1965, and no force on earth can come between Hollywood and Lucille Vinson, Alabama's answer to Veronica Lake.... (more)

Purple Hibiscus: A Novel

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A haunting tale of an Africa and an adolescence undergoing tremendous changes by a talented young Nigerian writer. Fifteen-year-old Kambili's world is circumscribed by the high walls of her family compound and the frangipani trees she can see from her bedroom window. Her wealthy Catholic father, although generous and well-respected in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. Her life is... (more)

Sleep Toward Heaven: A Novel

by Amanda Eyre Ward

Amanda Eyre Ward's debut novel is an intimate portrait of three women whose lives collide during a brutal Texas summer. In Gatestown, Texas, twenty-nine-year-old Karen Lowens awaits her execution with a host of convicted serial killers on death row. In Manhattan, Dr. Franny Wren, also twenty-nine, tends to a young cancer patient, and resists the urge to run from her fiancé and her carefully crafted life. In... (more)

Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine

by Ann Hood

This novel begins in 1969, and as Peter, Paul and Mary croon on the radio and poster paints are splashing the latest anti-war slogans. Suzanne, a poet, lives in a Maine beach house awaiting the birth of a love child she will name Sparrow. Claudia, who weds a farmer during college, plans to raise three strong sons. And Elizabeth and Howard marry, organize protest marches, and try to raise their two children with... (more)

The Year Of Living Famously (Red Dress Ink)

The Year Of Living Famously (Red Dress Ink)

by Laura Caldwell

Some girls seek fame, others have it thrust upon them. . . Clothing designer Kyra Felis has never been one to worship celebrities--she'd rather read a good book or make a blouse out of a tablecloth. She marries Hollywood man-of-the-moment Declan McKenna for love, with no inkling of how his notoriety will send her life spinning out of control. But once Kyra reluctantly becomes a celebrity by association... (more)

A Stone for Danny Fisher

by Harold Robbins

As a teenager, Danny Fisher had all he ever wanted -- a dog, a grown-up summer job, flirtatious relationships with older women -- and a talent for ruthless boxing that quickly made him a star in the amateur sporting world. But when Danny's family falls on hard times, moving from their comfortable home in Brooklyn to Manhattan's squalid Lower East Side, he is forced to leave his carefree childhood behind. Facing... (more)

City of Masks: A Cree Black Novel

by Daniel Hecht

In City of Masks , the first Cree Black novel, parapsychologist Cree and her partner take a case in New Orleans's Garden District that leaves them fearing for their own lives. The 150-year-old Beauforte House has long stood empty, until Lila Beauforte resumes residence and starts to see some of the house's secrets literally come to life. Tormented by an insidious and violent presence, Lila finds herself trapped... (more)

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by Julianna Baggott