Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. At the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor, living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. The story of an outlaw childhood... (more)

My Sister's Keeper

A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult is widely acclaimed for her keen insights into the hearts and minds of real people. Now she tells the emotionally riveting story of a family torn apart by conflicting needs and a passionate love that triumphs over human weakness. Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her... (more)

Me & Emma

by Elizabeth Flock

In many ways, Carrie Parker is like an other eight-year-old -- playing make-believe, dreading school, dreaming of faraway places. But even her imaginative mind can't shut out the realities of her impoverished North Carolina home or help her protect her younger sister, Emma. By turns achingly naive and utterly pragmatic, Carrie has been shaped by the loss of her beloved daddy and by a drunken stepfather and her... (more)

Little Children

by Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the... (more)

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana (Today Show Book Club #3)

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana (Today Show Book Club #3)

by Haven Kimmel

When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period–people helped their... (more)

PS, I Love You

by Cecelia Ahern

A novel about holding on, letting go, and learning to love again. Now in paperback, the endearing novel that captured readers' hearts and introduced a fresh new voice in women's fiction -- Cecelia Ahern. Holly couldn't live without her husband Gerry, until the day she had to. They were the kind of young couple who could finish each other's sentences. When Gerry succumbs to a terminal illness and dies,... (more)

Mercy

by Jodi Picoult

Police chief of a small Massachusetts town, Cameron McDonald makes the toughest arrest of his life when his own cousin Jamie comes to him and confesses outright that he has killed his terminally ill wife out of mercy. Now, a heated murder trial plunges the town into upheaval, and drives a wedge into a contented marriage: Cameron, aiding the prosecution in their case against Jamie, is suddenly at odds with his... (more)

Sharp Objects: A Novel

by Gillian Flynn

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg Since she left town eight years ago, Camille... (more)

Vanishing Acts: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

How do you recover the past when it was never yours to lose? Delia Hopkins has led a charmed life. Raised in rural New Hampshire by her beloved, widowed father, she now has a young daughter, a handsome fiance, and her own search-and-rescue bloodhound, which she uses to find missing persons. But as Delia plans her wedding, she is plagued by flashbacks of a life she can't recall...until a policeman knocks on her... (more)

The Drowning Tree: A Novel

by Carol Goodman

Artfully imagined, intricately detailed, eerily poignant: these are the outstanding features of Carol Goodman’s literary thrillers. She is part novelist, part craftsman—and The Drowning Tree is her newest masterpiece. Juno McKay intended to avoid the nearby campus of her alma mater during her fifteenth reunion weekend, but she just can’t turn down the chance to see her longtime friend, Christine Webb, speak at... (more)

Dreamland (reissue)

by Sarah Dessen

Rogerson Biscoe, with his green eyes and dark curly hair, is absolutely seductive. Before long, sixteen-year-old Caitlin finds herself under his spell. And when he starts to abuse her, she finds she's in too deep to get herself out...

Child of My Heart: A Novel

by Alice McDermott

In Alice McDermott's first work of fiction since her best-selling, National Book Award-winning Charming Billy , a woman recalls her fifteenth summer with the wry and bittersweet wisdom of hindsight. The beautiful child of older parents, raised on the eastern end of Long Island, Theresa is her town's most sought-after babysitter--cheerful, poised, an effortless storyteller, a wonder with children and animals.... (more)

The Mercy of Thin Air: A Novel

by Ronlyn Domingue

New Orleans, 1920s. Raziela Nolan is in the throes of a magnificent love affair when she dies in a tragic accident. In an instant, she leaves behind her one true love and her dream of becoming a doctor -- but somehow, she still remains. Immediately after her death, Razi chooses to stay between -- a realm that exists after life and before whatever lies beyond it. From this remarkable vantage point, Razi narrates... (more)

Ladies with Options

by Cynthia Hartwick

The members of the Mostly Methodist Club were used to swapping recipes, not stock tips. Until a pink-haired young rebel found her way into the group and tipped them off to how fun--and lucrative--taking a few risks can be.

The Secrets of a Fire King: Stories

by Kim Edwards

The first story collection from the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper’s Daughter With The Memory Keeper’s Daughter , Kim Edwards touched hearts across the nation. In this, her first collection of stories—now with three new stories added—she explores the lives of those who exist on the fringes of society: a fire-eater, an American and his Korean war bride, Madame Curie’s maid,... (more)

The Doctor's Wife

by Elizabeth Brundage

"The memory starts here, in my apron pocket, with the gun." So begins The Doctor’s Wife , a stunning debut novel about four people and the cataclysmic intersection of their lives. Michael is a rising OB/GYN at a prominent private practice in Albany, New York; he also moonlights at a local women’s health clinic. But Annie, his wife, has become tired of her workaholic husband’s absences, and the... (more)

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

by Maggie O'Farrell

In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage-clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend’s attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never knew existed, is being released from Cauldstone Hospital—where she has been locked away for more than sixty-one years. Iris’s grandmother Kitty always claimed to be an only child. But... (more)

THE BLACK DAHLIA

by James Ellroy

The flawed boxer-turned-lawman becomes obsessed with L.A.'s notorious unsolved 1947 torture-murder case, as well as the secret life of his missing partner, Lee Blanchard. Hoye proves a fine match for Ellroy's hardboiled prose, shuttling easily between hard and soft tones, crystallizing Bleichert's mix of cynicism, confusion, hurt and rage. Set in booming postwar Los Angeles, this tale of ambition, deceit and... (more)

Night Trilogy: Book 1

Night

by Elie Wiesel

In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night , a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers... (more)

Death of an ordinary man

by Glen Duncan

With Death of an Ordinary Man, Glen Duncan continues his penetrating and innovative exploration of the supernatural with a novel that is far and away his most powerful and accomplished yet. Nathan Clark's gravestone offers a short and hopeful summary: At rest. But Nathan is not at rest, and knows he won't be until he finds out why he died. Privy now to the innermost thoughts and feelings of his family and... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: borrowed from julie

A Memoir

by Augusten Burroughs

A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

by Elizabeth Flock

by Tom Perrotta

by Haven Kimmel

by Cecelia Ahern

by Jodi Picoult

by Gillian Flynn

by Jodi Picoult

by Carol Goodman

by Sarah Dessen

by Alice McDermott

by Ronlyn Domingue

by Cynthia Hartwick

by Kim Edwards

by Elizabeth Brundage

by Maggie O'Farrell

by James Ellroy

by Elie Wiesel

by Glen Duncan