Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Suburban Long Island in the 60s is the setting for this story of the binding love between a young couple, and the drastic actions they must take when she becomes pregnant. From the author of The Bigamist's Daughter.

The Tribes of Palos Verdes

by Joy Nicholson

Newly moved to the exclusive California beach community of Palos Verdes, Medina at 14 is awkward and instantly unpopular, while her good-looking brother Jim is quickly at home among the local surf scene. As her parents' marriage disintegrates and her brother drifts away, Medina turns to surfing, finding bitter solace in the challenge of the waves.

Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

by D. J. Waldie

An exquisitely realized and wholly original memoir of growing up in blue-collar 1950s Lakewood, California, the quintessential post-world war II American suburb and the prototype for the countless tract developments that would follow. Lyrical, compassionate statement of the hard-won values of American suburban places.

Sloth

by Gilbert Hernandez

Troubled teenager Miguel Torres has had it with life. The only alternative he sees is to willfully slip into a coma. But one year later, Miguel becomes a walking urban legend after he wakes up virtually unchanged -- except for his sloth-like pace. Soon, a haunted lemon orchard, the mysterious goat man, and murder will collide as Miguel, his girlfriend Lita and their best friend Romeo take on the teenage... (more)

Aloft

by Chang-rae Lee

Being a solo flyer made sense to Jerry Battle right from the start. For his 56th birthday, his longtime (and recently ex-) girlfriend Rita Reyes had given him a gift certificate for a flying lesson. Once Jerry was up there he thought, 'here was the little space I was looking for, my private box seat in the world and completely outside of it too.' From a half-mile over the earth, everything looked perfect to... (more)

The Family Stalker

by Jon Katz

Certain that someone has targeted her family for destruction, attorney Marianne Dow hires private detective Kit Deleeuw to follow the trail of a terrifying stalker, a woman who uses betrayal and twisted friendship to shatter happy families. Reprint. NYT.

Suburbia

by Bill Owens

A revised edition of the 70's classic with new color photographs

DEATH BY STATION WAGON (Suburban Detective Mysteries)

DEATH BY STATION WAGON (Suburban Detective Mysteries)

by Jon Katz

When two popular high school students are found dead on a deserted estate, soft-boiled private detective Christopher ""Kit"" Deleeuw finally gets a challenging case to solve. Reprint. PW.

Goodbye, Jimmy Choo

by Annie Sanders

Under normal circumstances, bohemian, skint Izzie Stock would never have met Maddy Hoare, a Gucci-clad, Beemer-driving urbanite. Their backgrounds and values appear to be a million miles apart. Then, due to their respective husbands' careers, both women are dumped into the English countryside, fish out of water with five young children between them. They are thrown together at a ghastly ladies' lunch and quickly... (more)

Home Land

by Sam Lipsyte

What if somebody finally wrote to his high school alumni bulletin and told...the truth! Here is an update from hell, and the most brilliant work to date, by the novelist whom Jeffrey Eugenides calls "original, devious, and very funny" and of whose first novel Chuck Palahniuk wrote, "I laughed out loud---and I never laugh out loud." The Eastern Valley High School Alumni newsletter, Catamount Notes, is bursting... (more)

The Tortilla Curtain

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts $20 and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, leaving Delaney to return to his privileged life in California. But these two men are fated against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants who he thinks are turning... (more)

Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids

Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids

by Donna Gaines

Teenage Wasteland provides memorable portraits of "rock and roll kids" and shrewd analyses of their interests in heavy metal music and Satanism. A powerful indictment of the often manipulative media coverage of youth crises and so-called alternative programs designed to help "troubled" teens, Teenage Wasteland draws new conclusions and presents solid reasons to admire the resilience of suburbia's dead end kids.... (more)

Middletown, America: One Town's Passage from Trauma to Hope

Middletown, America: One Town's Passage from Trauma to Hope

by Gail Sheehy

The single event that we know as 9/11 is over, but the shock waves continue to radiate outward, generated by orange alerts, terrorism lockdowns, and the shrinking of personal liberties we once took for granted. The stories in this book, of real people faced with extraordinary trauma and gradually transcending it, are the best antidote to our fears. Middletown, America is a book of hope. All Americans were hit... (more)

Girl, Interrupted (Vintage)

by Susanna Kaysen, Anna Hamilton Phelan, James Mangold, Lisa Loomer

In the late 1960s, the author spent nearly two years on the ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a renowned psychiatric facility. Her memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perceptions, while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. "Searing . . . captures an exquisite range of self-awareness between madness and insight."--Boston Globe.

Middlesex: A Novel

by Jeffrey Eugenides

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides --the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that... (more)

The World According to Garp

by John Irving

The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller ...

The Hours

by Michael Cunningham

The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end... (more)

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

by David Sedaris

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is a 2004 collection of 22 autobiographical essays by American humorist David Sedaris. The essays address the author's upbringing in Raleigh, North Carolina, his relationships with family members, and his work and life in New York City and France.

Goodnight Nobody: A Novel

by Jennifer Weiner

For Kate Klein, a semi-accidental mother of three, suburbia has been full of unpleasant surprises. Her once-loving husband is hardly ever home. The supermommies on the playground routinely snub her. Her days are spent carpooling and enduring endless games of Candy Land, and at night, most of her orgasms are of the do-it-yourself variety. When a fellow mother is murdered, Kate finds that the unsolved mystery is... (more)

The Dogs of Babel

by Carolyn Parkhurst

In Paul's fantastic and even perilous search for the truth about his wife's death, he abandons his everyday life to embark on a series of experiments designed to teach his dog Lorelei to communicate. Could she really give him the answers he is looking for?

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Browse Subjects: suburbia

Top Books

by Alice McDermott

by Joy Nicholson

by D. J. Waldie

by Gilbert Hernandez

by Chang-rae Lee

by Jon Katz

by Bill Owens

by Jon Katz

by Annie Sanders

by Sam Lipsyte

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

by Donna Gaines

by Gail Sheehy

by Susanna Kaysen, Anna Hamilton Phelan, James Mangold, Lisa Loomer

by Jeffrey Eugenides

by John Irving

by Michael Cunningham

by David Sedaris

by Jennifer Weiner

by Carolyn Parkhurst