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Leaving Cecil Street by Diane McKinney-Whetstone


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The Immortalists


Chloe Benjamin - 2018
    The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.

The Divide


Nicholas Evans - 2005
    It perched concealed at the head of a split and tortuous valley that descended to another far grander. Montana had ritzier ranches, with finer cuisine and glitzier guests. But there were few, if any, so beautiful. Its guests came by word of mouth and returned again and again. ... more » And thus it was with the Cooper family. For the last two weeks in June, they always took cabins six and eight. This was their fourth visit and it would be their last, the vacation that would change their lives forever.On a crystalline Montana morning, two backcountry skiers find the body of a young women embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. All through the night police work with floodlights and chainsaws to extract her. Identifying her, however, takes no time at all. Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and acts of ecoterrorism, and her picture is on law enforcement computers all across the country. But how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this golden child of a loving family so tragically astray?A devastating journey of discovery that extends from the streets of New York to the daunting grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, The Divide tells the story of a family fractured by betrayal and struggling in search of lost happiness. It explores the pain we inflict on those we love the most, and charts the passions and needs, the dashed hopes and disillusionments that connect and divide all men and women.

Home Wrecker


Dwayne S. Joseph - 2008
    As head fashion designer for an elite firm, she has no time for drama. Besides, her co-worker and friend, Marlene, fills her in on enough drama to last her whole day. Marlene's married to an attractive philanderer named Steve. She wants to divorce him, but there are complications in doing so. If she were to actually catch him cheating on her, then all of those other complications would go away. But how? A setup, of course. A business deal is made, and Lisette, the Home Wrecker, is born. Three years later, Lisette has made a career out of helping wealthy wives stick it to their controlling, soon-to-be ex-husbands. A job like this is not only stressful but very dangerous, so her clientele is kept very exclusive. When a mysterious caller says she needs help or else bad things will start to happen, there is more at stake than possible exposure... Lisette might get a taste of her own medicine.

Dead Above Ground


Jervey Tervalon - 2000
    Ever loyal to her mother, and adoring of her beautiful, restless, married sister Adele, Lita works hard to keep the family together as she attempts to establish her own life. But when Adele falls in love with Lucien Faure -- a smooth operator with "the devil's good looks" and a decades-old score to settle with Helen -- Lita unveils her mother's mysterious past to confront the Du Champs' long-buried secrets. Now, Lita finds she has one last and desperate chance to save the future of those she loves. Award-winning author Jervey Tervalon draws from his own heritage -- and the twisting family story that has lived and breathed inside him his whole life -- to create a spellbindingly luminous novel of passion, murder, and vengeance.

Cannery Row


John Steinbeck - 1945
    Rather, it is an attempt to capture the feeling and people of a place, the cannery district of Monterey, California, which is populated by a mix of those down on their luck and those who choose for other reasons not to live "up the hill" in the more respectable area of town. The flow of the main plot is frequently interrupted by short vignettes that introduce us to various denizens of the Row, most of whom are not directly connected with the central story. These vignettes are often characterized by direct or indirect reference to extreme violence: suicides, corpses, and the cruelty of the natural world.The "story" of Cannery Row follows the adventures of Mack and the boys, a group of unemployed yet resourceful men who inhabit a converted fish-meal shack on the edge of a vacant lot down on the Row.Sweet Thursday is the sequel to Cannery Row.

You Gotta Sin to Get Saved


J.D. Mason - 2008
    Too much love, too much attention, and had too many big dreams.   It was how she ended up abandoning her two daughters, Connie and Reesy to chase after a man and the promise of a dream life.   But Charlotte never anticipated how her world would be irrevocably changed.  Now, twenty-seven years later, her whole world shifts yet again with a letter from one of her daughters.  And the past is about to bust wide open.   Reesy has always been obsessed with something.  Obsessed with finding her birth mother. Obsessed with her sister’s life. Obsessed with her own adopted daughter never finding out that Reesy is really her aunt.  With a neglected husband, who is unknowingly drifting further and further away, a sister who is trying to escape her well-meaning clutches, and a daughter becoming more and more curious about her true parentage, finding the mother she always dreamed about seems to be an answered prayer to Reesy.  That is until Reesy is brought crashing back to earth to find that her perfect life is in tattered pieces.Connie has always expected too little. Too little from the man she’s been living with for years. Too little from her modest jewelry business.  And too little from her relationships, or lack thereof, with her daughter, mother and sister. And too little from herself.  Until she discovers she is pregnant again and decides that this time she is keeping her baby, sending her life and her relationship into a tailspin.  And rediscovering the mother who left them behind is the last thing she wants.  Thrown back together again, in a maelstrom of shocking truths, Charlotte, Reesy and Connie will discover on their journey to forgiveness and redemption that you just might have to sin first in order to be saved.

Suspicious Minds


Gwenda Bond - 2019
    A sinister scientist. A secret history. If you think you know the truth behind Eleven’s mother, prepare to have your mind turned Upside Down in this thrilling prequel to the hit show Stranger Things.It’s the summer of 1969, and the shock of conflict reverberates through the youth of America, both at home and abroad. As a student at a quiet college campus in the heartland of Indiana, Terry Ives couldn’t be further from the front lines of Vietnam or the incendiary protests in Washington.But the world is changing, and Terry isn’t content to watch from the sidelines. When word gets around about an important government experiment in the small town of Hawkins, she signs on as a test subject for the project, codenamed MKUltra. Unmarked vans, a remote lab deep in the woods, mind-altering substances administered by tightlipped researchers . . . and a mystery the young and restless Terry is determined to uncover.But behind the walls of Hawkins National Laboratory—and the piercing gaze of its director, Dr. Martin Brenner—lurks a conspiracy greater than she could have ever imagined. To face it, she’ll need the help of her fellow test subjects, including one so mysterious the world doesn’t know she exists—a young girl with unexplainable, superhuman powers and a number instead of a name: 008.Amid the rising tensions of the new decade, Terry Ives and Martin Brenner have begun a different kind of war—one where the human mind is the battlefield.

The Light Between Oceans


M.L. Stedman - 2012
    After four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns home to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day's journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom's judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them. M. L. Stedman's mesmerizing, beautifully written debut novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel's decision to keep this "gift from God." And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another's tragic loss.

About Grace


Anthony Doerr - 2004
    Henrys, and shared the Young Lions Award. Now he has written one of the most beautiful, wise, and compelling first novels of recent times. David Winkler begins life in Anchorage, Alaska, a quiet boy drawn to the volatility of weather and obsessed with snow. Sometimes he sees things before they happen—a man carrying a hatbox will be hit by a bus; Winkler will fall in love with a woman in a supermarket. When David dreams that his infant daughter will drown in a flood as he tries to save her, he comes undone. He travels thousands of miles, fleeing family, home, and the future itself, to deny the dream. On a Caribbean island, destitute, alone, and unsure if his child has survived or his wife can forgive him, David is sheltered by a couple with a daughter of their own. Ultimately it is she who will pull him back into the world, to search for the people he left behind. Doerr's characters are full of grief and longing, but also replete with grace. His compassion for human frailty is extraordinarily moving. In luminous prose, he writes about the power and beauty of nature and about the tiny miracles that transform our lives. About Grace is heartbreaking, radiant, and astonishingly accomplished.

The Seven Sisters


Lucinda Riley - 2014
    Each of them is handed a tantalizing clue to her true heritage—a clue which takes Maia across the world to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Once there, she begins to put together the pieces of her story and its beginnings.Eighty years earlier in Rio’s Belle Epoque of the 1920s, Izabela Bonifacio’s father has aspirations for his daughter to marry into the aristocracy. Meanwhile, architect Heitor da Silva Costa is devising plans for an enormous statue, to be called Christ the Redeemer, and will soon travel to Paris to find the right sculptor to complete his vision. Izabela—passionate and longing to see the world—convinces her father to allow her to accompany him and his family to Europe before she is married. There, at Paul Landowski’s studio and in the heady, vibrant cafes of Montparnasse, she meets ambitious young sculptor Laurent Brouilly, and knows at once that her life will never be the same again.In this sweeping, epic tale of love and loss—the first in a unique, spellbinding series of seven novels—Lucinda Riley showcases her storytelling talent like never before.

Church Folk


Michele Andrea Bowen - 2001
    He's also a pastor. And when he starts courting the quiet, homespun Essie Lee Lane-and she accepts his marriage proposal-a few of the church folk decide to teach Essie what it really means to be a pastor's wife, and show her how little she knows about them. But as Theophilus gains prominence in his denomination, Essie evolves from a mousy parishioner into an independent and Godly woman. Now sporting an afro and driving her new purple Cadillac, Essie teaches the church folk what it really means to stand by your man-and your beliefs.

You Are One of Them


Elliott Holt - 2013
    Ten years later, Sarah is about to graduate from college when she receives a mysterious letter from Moscow suggesting that Jenny's death might have been a hoax.  She sets off to the former Soviet Union in search of the truth, but the more she delves into her personal Cold War history, the harder it is to separate facts from propaganda.You Are One of Them is a taut, moving debut about the ways in which we define ourselves against others and the secrets we keep from those who are closest to us.  In her insightful forensic of a mourned friendship, Holt illuminates the long lasting sting of abandonment and the measures we take to bring back those we have lost.

Bridge of Clay


Markus Zusak - 2018
    As the Dunbar boys love and fight and learn to reckon with the adult world, they discover the moving secret behind their father’s disappearance. At the center of the Dunbar family is Clay, a boy who will build a bridge—for his family, for his past, for greatness, for his sins, for a miracle. The question is, how far is Clay willing to go? And how much can he overcome?

Bodega Dreams


Ernesto Quiñonez - 2000
    The word is out in Spanish Harlem: Willy Bodega is king.  Need college tuition for your daughter?  Start-up funds for your fruit stand?  Bodega can help.  He gives everyone a leg up, in exchange only for loyalty--and a steady income from the drugs he pushes.Lyric, inspired, and darkly funny, this powerful debut novel brilliantly evokes the trial of Chino, a smart, promising young man to whom Bodega turns for a favor.  Chino is drawn to Bodega's street-smart idealism, but soon finds himself over his head, navigating an underworld of switchblade tempers, turncoat morality, and murder.

Cage of Stars


Jacquelyn Mitchard - 2006
    The author of The Deep End of the Ocean delivers a compelling, emotionally charged tale of tragedy, revenge, and redemption, set in a close-knit Mormon community, whose peace is shattered by two brutal murders.