Book picks similar to
Three Great Novels by Charles Dickens


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The Help


Kathryn Stockett - 2009
    She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women, mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends, view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't. (jacket flap)Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

The Waterworks


E.L. Doctorow - 1994
    While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.”

Levon's Ride


Chuck Dixon - 2015
    But they should never have stolen Levon’s Ride.Levon Cade returns in this relentless novella of retribution.Levon and his daughter Merry are on the run. When their SUV is taken off a mall parking lot, it’s up to Levon to find it. The car means nothing to him but the million dollars in cash and uncut diamonds that are hidden in it mean freedom for Levon and his little girl. He uses his skills and courage to uncover a widespread network of thieves and invite the wrath of a local gang.More of the remorseless violence and high-speed action that readers have come to expect from Chuck Dixon. Includes five illustrations by legendary comic book artist and illustrator Butch Guice.Jaye Manus, Editor

84, Charing Cross Road


Helene Hanff - 1970
    Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books. Their relationship, captured so acutely in these letters, is one that will grab your heart and not let go.

The Brontës Complete Works


Charlotte Brontë - 2011
    Collected in this giant book is the collective works of Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Bronte (along with their father Patrick Bronte). Included in this edition: Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, Cottage Poems, The Professor, Shirley, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Villette, Wuthering Heights and many others.

The Long View


Elizabeth Jane Howard - 1956
    'The Long View', a revealing portrait of a marriage, is the ingenious construction of a couple's story that offers a remarkable and very real view of the shifting relationship between two people from 1950 to 1926.(The author, Elizabeth Jane Howard, rose to international stardom with her magnificent Cazalet family saga.)

The Bonfire of the Vanities, Part 1


Tom Wolfe - 1990
    This gargantuan helping of the human comedy relates how he is devoured by the masses of New York, a city boiling over with the itch to grab it now.

Happy All the Time


Laurie Colwin - 1978
    Guido plans to write poetry while Vincent feels confident he will win a Nobel prize for physics. When Guido spots Holly while exiting a museum, he can immediately sense that she will be difficult, quirky, and hard to live with. He loves her on sight. Vincent, open-minded and cheerful, meets Misty at work. Though she is a  bored and misanthropic brunette, he finds himself desperate to know her. Through courtship, jealousy, estrangement, and other perils, Happy All the Time follows four sane, intelligent, and good-intentioned people who manage to find love in spite of themselves.

Sweet William


Beryl Bainbridge - 1975
    Then she meets William: snub-nosed and generous, cunning and protean. She is first seduced then transfixed as William's past, present and future swirl around her kaleidoscopically, overwhelmingly, and Ann herself is irrevocably changed.

More Than Honor/On Basilisk Station


David Weber - 1998
    

The Brontë Sisters: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre


Emily Brontë - 1847
    This omnibus collects in a single volume two novels that they published in 1847, each a tale of passionate romance and transformative personal experience. Jane Eyre At Thornfield Hall, where she takes employment as a governess, Jane Eyre finds fulfillment in her work, and the love of her life in her employer Edward Rochester. When a dark secret from Rochester’s past comes to light, Jane must make the most difficult decision of her life: to stay beside the man she loves regardless of the truth, or to embark upon a new life free of encumbrances of the past. Wuthering Heights From the moment of his adoption by the Earnshaws, the foundling boy Heathcliff devotes himself to their young daughter Catherine. Growing up together the two share a love that blossoms into romance, until Catherine’s hurtful betrayal. Embittered as an adult, Heathcliff vents his rage on his and Catherine’s heirs, manipulating their lives under the influence of a passion that has curdled into obsession.

Vanessa and Her Sister


Priya Parmar - 2014
    Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby, and Adrian are leaving behind their childhood home and taking a house in the leafy heart of avant-garde Bloomsbury. There they bring together a glittering circle of bright, outrageous artistic friends who will grow into legend and come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. And at the center of this charmed circle are the devoted, gifted sisters: Vanessa, the painter, and Virginia, the writer.   Each member of the group will go on to earn fame and success, but so far Vanessa Bell has never sold a painting. Virginia Woolf’s book review has just been turned down by The Times. Lytton Strachey has not published anything. E. M. Forster has finished his first novel but does not like the title. Leonard Woolf is still a civil servant in Ceylon, and John Maynard Keynes is looking for a job. Together, this sparkling coterie of artists and intellectuals throw away convention and embrace the wild freedom of being young, single bohemians in London.   But the landscape shifts when Vanessa unexpectedly falls in love and her sister feels dangerously abandoned. Eerily possessive, charismatic, manipulative, and brilliant, Virginia has always lived in the shelter of Vanessa’s constant attention and encouragement. Without it, she careens toward self-destruction and madness. As tragedy and betrayal threaten to destroy the family, Vanessa must decide if it is finally time to protect her own happiness above all else.   The work of exciting young newcomer Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister exquisitely captures the champagne-heady days of prewar London and the extraordinary lives of sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.Advance praise for Vanessa and Her Sister   “Priya Parmar is on a high-wire act all her own in this radiantly original novel about the Bloomsbury Set. Irrepressible, with charm and brio to spare, Vanessa and Her Sister boldly invites us to that moment in history when famous minds sparked and collided. Prepare to be dazzled.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife   “With sparkling wit and insight, Priya Parmar sets us down into the legendary Bloomsbury household of the Stephen siblings, where sisters Vanessa and Virginia vie for love and primacy amidst a collection of eccentric guests. Vanessa and Her Sister kidnapped me for a couple of days. I couldn’t put it down.”—Nancy Horan, author of Under the Wide and Starry Sky   “I loved this brilliant depiction of the true price of genius. Parmar’s novel shines a bright light into the empty spaces between the lines of history.”—Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand   “This is the novel I didn’t know I was waiting for, and it is, quite simply, astonishing: not just because of Priya Parmar’s preternatural skill at evoking the moment when the lid was coming off the Victorians, but because of how she has caught the two sisters at the center of that swirl. It is beautiful, wise, and as deft as a stroke upon the canvas.”—Sarah Blake, author of The Postmistress