Daughter of Fortune / Isabel Allende (2000)
The story of a young woman’s quest for love and fortune during the California Gold Rush in San Francisco. (FIC ALLENDE)
Middlesex / Jeffery Eugenides (2007)
Calliope’s friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparent’s desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s. (FIC EUGENIDES)
The Corrections / Jonathan Franzen (2001)
Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he begins to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson’s disease. (FIC FRANZEN)
A Lesson Before Dying / Ernest J. Gaines (1997)
A young illiterate African American man witnesses two black robbers kill a white store owner in Louisana in the late 1940s, and he is the one convicted. (FIC GAINES)
The Invention of Wings / Sue Monk Kidd (2014)
Traces more than three decades in the lives of a wealthy Charleston debutante who longs to break free from the strictures of her household and pursue a meaningful life; and the urban slave, Handful, who is placed in her charge as a child before finding courage and a sense of self. (FIC KIDD)
I Know This Much is True / Wally Lamb (1998)
Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. (FIC LAMB)
Where the Heart Is / Billie Letts (1998)
Pregnant, overweight, and convinced about her inherent bad luck, Novalee Nation hopes for a new life in a new state with her boyfriend but is dumped along the way in Oklahoma, where she finds her spirit renewed. (FIC LETTS)
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie / Ayana Mathis (2012)
Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family. (FIC MATHIS)
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail / Malika Oufkir (2001)
The daughter of a former aide to the king of Morocco, who was executed after a failed assassination attempt on the ruler, describes how she, her five siblings, and her mother were imprisoned in a desert penal colony for twenty years. (921 OUFKIR)
Drowning Ruth / Christina Schwarz (2000)
Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family’s rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and young niece, Ruth. (FIC SCHWARZ)