Roomie Wars


Kat T. Masen - 2016
    Who said you had to be married with a fabulous career and three kids? I had a great life. Single, freedom to do whatever I please, and best of all, stay home on a Friday night in my sweats, eating pizza while listening to the best of the ’80s. I’m fine. DrewWhen a woman says she’s fine, she’s not fine. Zoey had it all. Stunning looks, ambition, the whole package. Then he fucked her up. He broke her. And now I’m left picking up the pieces… again. Zoey Richards, strong-willed and driven, settled on the geeky struggling med student to share her apartment with, not the perfect-in-every-way stud who would just distract her and undoubtedly break her heart. When her ex comes back into the picture, Zoey seeks revenge and enlists her roommate’s help. All Zoey and Drew need to do is pretend to be a couple for one night. But one night can change everything. Refusing to break their “roomie code,” and in an effort to deny their feelings for each other, a war erupts between Zoey and Drew. She lives in the past; he, for the future. If opposites attract, will these two gamble their friendship for a chance at love?

The Boy I Loved Before


Jenny Colgan - 2004
    While it might be okay for Sashy, it's certainly not what she envisioned for herself when she was sixteen. So when her boyfriend proposes to her during the reception, Flora makes a wish to go back and do it all over again. The next morning she wakes up to find that she has been given the ultimate second chance--she's sixteen again. As Flora navigates school, first loves--new and old--and discovers what it really means to make adult choices, will she stay in her new body or try and find her way home?--in Jenny Colgan's The Boy I Loved Before.

The Invisible Husband of Frick Island


Colleen Oakley - 2021
    Piper Parrish's life on Frick Island—a tiny, remote town smack in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay—is nearly perfect. Well, aside from one pesky detail: Her darling husband, Tom, is dead. When Tom's crab boat capsized and his body wasn't recovered, Piper, rocked to the core, did a most peculiar thing: carried on as if her husband was not only still alive, but right there beside her, cooking him breakfast, walking him to the docks each morning, meeting him for their standard Friday night dinner date at the One-Eyed Crab. And what were the townspeople to do but go along with their beloved widowed Piper? Anders Caldwell’s career is not going well. A young ambitious journalist, he’d rather hoped he’d be a national award-winning podcaster by now, rather than writing fluff pieces for a small town newspaper. But when he gets an assignment to travel to the remote Frick Island and cover their boring annual Cake Walk fundraiser, he stumbles upon a much more fascinating tale: an entire town pretending to see and interact with a man who does not actually exist. Determined it’s the career-making story he’s been needing for his podcast, Anders returns to the island to begin covert research and spend more time with the enigmatic Piper—but he has no idea out of all the lives he’s about to upend, it’s his that will change the most.

Funny Girl


Nick Hornby - 2014
    . .Barbara Parker is Miss Blackpool of 1964, but she doesn't want to be a beauty queen. She wants to make people laugh.So she leaves her hometown behind, takes herself to London, and overnight she becomes the lead in a new BBC comedy, Sophie Straw: charming, gorgeous, destined to win the nation's hearts.

An Imperfect Witch


Debora Geary - 2013
    Now she's a hot young realtor with a great life, an awesome guy, and enough friends to chase away the ghosts of her past.Almost.The crystal ball has spoken - life isn't done messing with her yet. And neither is the need brewing in the eyes of the man she loves.The eve of Halloween approaches. And whatever the sexy poet realtor wants to believe, moving beyond your past isn't the same as facing the future.This is the first book in my new Witch Central series, featuring my well-loved clan of modern witches and those who love them. Light contemporary fantasy with a good dose of humor, a little romance, and characters you won't want to leave.

Starter for Ten


David Nicholls - 2003
    Brian Jackson, a working-class kid on full scholarship, has started his first term at university. He has a dark secret—a long-held, burning ambition to appear on the wildly popular British TV quiz show University Challenge—and now, finally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. He's made the school team, and they've completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their first televised match. (And, what's more, he's fallen head over heels for one of his teammates, the beautiful, brainy, and intimidatingly posh Alice Harbinson.) Life seems perfect and triumph inevitable—but as his world opens up, Brian learns that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

The Reader on the 6.27


Jean-Paul Didierlaurent - 2014
    It is sure to capture the hearts of book lovers everywhere. Guylain Vignolles lives on the edge of existence. Working at a job he hates, he has but one pleasure in life ...Sitting on the 6.27 train each day, Guylain reads aloud. And it's this release of words into the world that starts our hero on a journey that will finally bring meaning into his life. For one morning, Guylain discovers the diary of a lonely young woman: Julie. A woman who feels as lost in the world as he does. As he reads from these pages to a rapt audience, Guylain finds himself falling hopelessly in love with their enchanting author ...The Reader on the 6.27 is a tale bursting with larger-than-life characters, each of whom touches Guylain's life for the better. This captivating novel is a warm, funny fable about literature's power to uplift even the most downtrodden of lives. 'The humanity of the characters ...the re-enchantment of everyday life, the power of words and literature, tenderness and humour ...

The Art of French Kissing


Kristin Harmel - 2007
    The point is -- she's in Paris! Which would be great, except that she's stuck doing public relations for one of the hottest -- and craziest -- rock stars on the planet. Making things worse is Gabriel Francoeur, the sexy and stubborn reporter who refuses to believe her when she tells him that her client was just playing Go Fish in that hotel room with all those scantily-clad girls.... But Emma will always have Paris. The City of Light, of romance, of high fashion and of unfathomable varieties of cheese. If a girl can't reinvent herself here, there's no hope! It's time to leave the old Emma Sullivan behind and become someone courageous, exciting, successful. The type of girl who, when faced with a reporter who won't stop asking questions, knows just what to do. After all, they don't call it French kissing for nothing!

Connect: Book Two (Chat Connect Crash series, #2)


Nan McCarthy - 2014
    It’s now 1996, and Bev and Max, two strangers who met online, find their lives unexpectedly intertwined. As their words and actions propel them into unexplored territory, Bev and Max’s relationship grows more intense—and more complex—than they ever imagined.Praised as “a lively, free-flowing, spontaneous outburst of curiosity, anxiety and hope,” the story of Bev and Max unfolds entirely through their online messages. Readers once again find themselves unable to resist the temptation to “eavesdrop” on the pair’s sexually charged, humorous, and thought-provoking exchanges. In a time before Facebook, Skype, and Twitter, when there were no status updates, no photos, no tweets, no video chats, all Bev and Max have to share with one another are their words—or so it may seem.In this newest edition of her Chat, Connect, and Crash series, McCarthy offers up a snapshot of the mid-1990s Internet culture and its changing dynamic of human interaction. As Bev and Max gradually reveal themselves by what they choose to say—and leave unsaid—their seductive, addicting, and all-too-human adventures will draw you from first page to last.

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells


Andrew Sean Greer - 2013
    After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the break up with her long-time lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she'd been born in a different era.During the course of her treatment, Greta cycles between her own time and her alternate lives in 1918, as a bohemian adulteress, and 1941, as a devoted mother and wife. Separated by time and social mores, Greta's three lives are achingly similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards, and each extracts a different price. And the modern Greta learns that her alternate selves are unpredictable, driven by their own desires and needs.As her final treatment looms, questions arise. What will happen once each Greta learns how to stay in one of the other worlds? Who will choose to remain in which life?Magically atmospheric, achingly romantic, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells beautifully imagines "what if" and wondrously wrestles with the impossibility of what could be.

An Object of Beauty


Steve Martin - 2010
    Groomed at Sotheby's and hungry to keep climbing the social and career ladders put before her, Lacey charms men and women, old and young, rich and even richer with her magnetic charisma and liveliness. Her ascension to the highest tiers of the city parallel the soaring heights--and, at times, the dark lows--of the art world and the country from the late 1990s through today.

The Lost Husband


Katherine Center - 2013
    Now her crazy Aunt Jean has offered Libby an escape, a job and a place to live on her farm in the Texas Hill Country. Before she can talk herself out of it, Libby is packing the minivan, grabbing the kids, and hitting the road. Life on Aunt Jean's goat farm is both more wonderful and more mysterious than Libby could have imagined. Beyond the animals and the strenuous work, there is quiet, deep, country quiet. But there is also a shaggy, gruff (though purportedly handsome, under all that hair) farm manager with a tragic home life, a formerly famous feed-store clerk who claims she can contact Danny "on the other side," and the eccentric aunt Libby never really knew but who turns out to be exactly what she's been looking for. And despite everything she's lost, Libby soon realizes how much more she's found. Libby hasn't just traded one kind of crazy for another; she may actually have found the place to bring her little family, and herself, back to life.

The Villa in Italy


Elizabeth Edmondson - 2006
    Delia, an opera singer robbed of her voice by illness; George, an idealistic scientist who cannot face what his skills have created; Marjorie, desperately poor and unable to dislodge her writer’s block; and Lucius, ostensibly in control but whose personal life is in chaos. All are summoned to the Villa Dante, home of the late Beatrice Malaspina. But who was she?While they wait to find out, the villa begins to work its seductive magic. With its faded frescoes, overgrown garden and magnificent mediaeval tower, it is unlike anywhere they have been before. Slowly, four characters who have gone to great lengths to hide their troubles find that change – and even hope – is possible after all. But the mysterious Beatrice has a devastating secret to reveal that will affect them all…A beautiful evocation of Italy in the aftermath of World War Two, the personal consequences of living through such a time, and a celebration of humankind’s ability to heal and learn to love again, this most absorbing novel will win Elizabeth Edmondson a host of new fans.

The Summer Without Men


Siri Hustvedt - 2011
    A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment."   Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragicomic poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people’s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,“the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own. From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

Capital


John Lanchester - 2012
    It’s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London—a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder—are receiving anonymous postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.