HISTORICAL FICTION - BIOGRAPHICAL Beautiful young horse trainer, adventurer and aviator Beryl Markham tells the story of her life among the glamorous and decadent circle of British expats living in colonial East Africa--and the complicated love triangle she shared with the white hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa. A fictitious account of Beryl's life set in colonial Kenya in the 1920s.
(14 copies)
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ROMANCE FICTION - MANHATTAN NEW YORK A unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), this novel explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, 19-year-old Vivian has just been kicked out of college, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her aunt who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves - and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest. Now 89 years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life - and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it.
(13 copies)
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THRILLERS - VATICAN CITY The bestselling author of An Officer and a Spy turns to today's Vatican in a ripped-from-the-headlines novel, and gives us his most ambitious, page-turning thriller yet. The pope is dead. Cardinal Lomeli, dean of the College of Cardinals, presides over the election for the next pope and, in the process, uncovers evidence of corruption among the sequestered cardinals. He must act discreetly to ensure that the eventual pope is spiritually worthy of the post. Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world's most secretive election. They are holy men. But they are not immune to the human temptations of power and glory. And they are not above the tribalism and factionalism that consumes humanity. When all is said and done, one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on Earth."--Provided by publisher.
(10 copies)
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HISTORICAL FICTION - FAMILIES From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried....
Sissy, born 1961: Sissy's relationship with her beautiful and volatile mother is difficult, even dangerous, but her life is also filled with beautiful things, including a new Christmas present, a doll called Ethel. Ethel whispers advice and kindness in Sissy's ear, and in one especially terrifying moment, maybe even saves Sissy's life.
Lillian, born 1925: Born in her ancestral lands in a time of terrible change, Lillian clings to her sister, Blanche, and her doll, Mae. When the sisters are forced to attend an "Indian school" far from their home, Blanche refuses to be cowed by the school's abusive nuns. But when tragedy strikes the sisters, the doll Mae finds her way to defend the girls.
Cora, born 1888: Though she was born into the brutal legacy of the "Indian Wars," Cora isn't afraid of the white men who remove her to a school across the country to be "civilized." When teachers burn her beloved buckskin and beaded doll Winona, Cora discovers that the spirit of Winona may not be entirely lost...
(15 copies)
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We meet Andrew Leland as he’s suspended in the liminal state of the soon-to-be blind: he’s midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from sightedness to blindness over years, even decades. He grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now sees the world as if through a narrow tube. Soon—but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left.
Full of apprehension but also dogged curiosity, Leland embarks on a sweeping exploration of the state of being that awaits him: not only the physical experience of blindness but also its language, politics, and customs. He negotiates his changing relationships with his wife and son, and with his own sense of self, as he moves from his mainstream, “typical” life to one with a disability. Part memoir, part historical and cultural investigation, The Country of the Blind represents Leland’s determination not to merely survive this transition but to grow from it—to seek out and revel in that which makes blindness enlightening.
Thought-provoking and brimming with warmth and humor, The Country of the Blind is a deeply personal and intellectually exhilarating tour of a way of being that most of us have never paused to consider—and from which we have much to learn.
(10 copies)
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HISTORICAL FICTION - INDIA Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl--and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi--will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
(15 copies)
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DOMESTIC FICTION - RICH PEOPLE The outrageously funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of the season.
(12 copies)
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY - MUSCICIAN An unflinching, powerful memoir about the author’s life, growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
She tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Oregon, of struggling with her mother's high expectations of her and of a painful adolescence but with treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul where she and her mother would bond over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band and meeting the man who would become her husband her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
(5 copies)
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HISTORICAL FICTION - AFRICA Twin brothers are orphaned at childbirth in Addis Ababa. When they fall in love with the same woman, one brother goes to work in an underfunded New York hospital. Here his past catches up with him.
(15 copies)
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SCIENCE FICTION - THRILLER A mind-bending, relentlessly paced science-fiction thriller, in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious--and awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew.
(13 copies)
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