A Whole Bunch of Terrific Fiction
Discover a treasure trove of terrific fiction in this curated book list, featuring beloved authors like John Grisham, Alice Hoffman, and Kate Christensen. From captivating tales like *Bulls Island* and *Garden Spells* to unforgettable stories in *Night Train to Lisbon* and *The Great Man*, this collection spans gripping novels, adventure, and heartfelt drama. Perfect for book lovers seeking their next great read, this roundup highlights a diverse range of compelling fiction, from contemporary classics to hidden gems, all in one inspiring bunch.
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Playing For Pizza
by John Grisham
Rick Dockery was the third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. In the AFC Championship game against Denver, to the surprise and dismay of virtually everyone, Rick actually got into the game. With a 17-point lead and just minutes to go, Rick provided what was arguably the worst single performance in the history of the NFL. Overnight, he became a national laughingstock and, of course, was immediately cut by the Browns and shunned by all other teams. But all Rick knows is football, and he insists that his agent, Arnie, find a team that needs him. Against enormous odds Arnie finally locates just such a team and informs Rick that, miraculously, he can in fact now be astartingquarterback. Great, says Rick--for which team? The mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy. Yes, Italians do play American football, to one degree or another, and the Parma Panthers desperately want a former NFL player--any former NFL player--at their helm. So Rick reluctantly agrees to play for the Panthers--at least until a better offer comes along--and heads off to Italy. He knows nothing about Parma--not even where it is--has never been to Europe, and doesn't speak or understand a word of Italian. To say that Italy--the land of opera, fine wines, extremely small cars, romance, andFootball Americano-- holds a few surprises for Rick Dockery would be something of an understatement.
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The Worst Thing I've Done
by Ursula Hegi
-- ask me, Annie. Ask me what's the worst thing I've done. Ask, goddammit. Because then you'll know I'll never go beyond last night.Tonight, Annie is driving alone from North Sea to Montauk and back again, as she has every night since her husband, Mason, challenged what she believed about herself and about their marriage. Eating junk food and listening to talk radio, Annie tries to shut out her rage, her pain, but Mason's voice persists within her, as urgent as the voices of the anonymous callers who confess their misery to the radio psychologists.Once again, Ursula Hegi writes along that border where bliss and sorrow meet. Sensuous, funny, and mysterious, her new novel takes us into an exuberant and troubled friendship. Since early childhood, Annie, Jake, and Mason have had a special bond. When Annie's parents die on the same night that she and Mason are married, the three friends decide to raise Annie's newborn sister, Opal, together.Annie struggles to be both a sister and a mother to Opal, a wife to Mason, and a friend to Jake. Not surprisingly, their relationships, already entangled, grow dangerous, too close, on the line. One fateful night the three friends miss the moment when they could still turn back, and they goad each other to step across the line, with shocking, unforeseen consequences.Set on the East End of Long Island,The Worst Thing I've Doneis an incandescent story of love, friendship, and marriage; of joy and betrayal;of an artist's struggle to reconnect with her work; and of how we can choose our mothers, our families. Beautifully written and brilliantly vivid, it explores the resilience in the protagonists' lives, and their courage to move forward despite an uncertain future.
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Heaven's Net is Wide
by Lian Hearn
Follows the story of spiritual mentor Lord Otori Shigeru, who receives warrior training, forges a relationship with a tribe of mysterious assassins, and meets the Lady Maruyama.
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A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
by Xiaolu Guo
Drawing on her diaries written upon her initial arrival in London, Guo creates this story to match her own steadily improving English. Freshly humorous, sexy, and poignant, this debut novel is an utterly original story about language, identity, and the cultural divide.
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Season of Gene
by Dallas Hudgens
Somewhere between incarceration and sainthood stands Joe Rice, a man who relishes peace, painkillers, and his Friday-night baseball league. When his shady business partner Gene dies rounding the bases, Joe knows this isn't going to be an ordinary season. Soon enough, a suburban ex-mobster, his entrepreneurial son, and a gun-toting minister have Tasered, maced and harassed Joe over the location of a three-million-dollar Babe Ruth baseball bat he doesn't know anything about. Joe just wants to save his car-detailing/ticker brokerage business from Gene's mountain of debt, crime and craziness. (Winning a game of Madden NFGL against his ex-girlfriend's twelve-year-old son would also be a relief.) But first, he must confront the ghosts of his past - namely, his murdered uncle and his mentally unstable mother. He must also deal with the present, navigating the space between the two women he cares about. And finally, he must face the future, every man's least favorite obstacle. Dallas Hudgens, the acclaimed author of Drive Like Hell, blends Guatemalan chicken, online pharmaceuticals, and unforgettable characters in a raucous but moving story of love and baseball. Season of Gene is a wild ride of a novel about a troubled man, the troubled women who love him and a legendary baseball bat that could either save their lives or get them killed.
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Tangerine Dream
by Ken Douglas
Best friends Haley and Taylor must deal with a terrible loss when Taylor's twin sister, Dylan, is killed in a car crash. Meanwhile, Taylor and Dylan's father, a senator running for president and supposedly somewhere on the campaign trail, can't be reached because he is in the arms of a prostitute. While the girls and the twins' mother try to recover and avoid the press in New Zealand, Nick Nesbitt, a television news reporter, senses a story and will stop at nothing to get it.
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The Great Man
by Kate Christensen
Following the death of New York City painter Oscar Feldman, an artist known for his paintings of the female nude, two rival biographers set out to tell his life story, with the help of his wife Abigail, sister Maxine, and Teddy, his longtime mistress.
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The End of the Alphabet
by C. S. Richardson
Reeling from the news that his doctor is giving him only one month to live, fifty-year-old Ambrose Zephyr and his loving wife, Zipper, embark on a whirlwind tour from A to Z of all the places he has ever loved or has ever wanted to visit.
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The Third Angel
by Alice Hoffman
Follows the lives of three women in love with the wrong men--Madeleine Heller, attracted to her sister's fiance; Frieda Lewis, the muse to an ill-fated rock star; and Bryn Evans, engaged to be married but secretly obsessed with her ex-husband.
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Redemption Falls
by Joseph O'Connor
As the bloody Civil War ends, teenager Eliza Mooney sets out on foot from Baton Rouge to find her brother and only remaining kin, 12-year-old Jeddo Mooney. The young drummer boy survived the war to become the surrogate son of General James O'Keefe, a man with a disreputable past and now acting governor of an untamed mountain territory.
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Celebutantes
by Amanda Goldberg
Two "Hollywood Kids" have written a name-dropping, scandal-wielding romp through Hollywood during Oscar week
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The Sea Lady
by Margaret Drabble
Traveling separately to Ornemouth, England, a town by the North Sea where they had spent a summer together as children, Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman reassess the course of their individual lives and decisions over the past thirty years of separation.
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Life Class
by Pat Barker
A novel capturing the devastation and psychological trauma of the Great War on every level of British society focuses on a group of young art students, including Paul Tarrant, a Red Cross volunteer, who discovers that life, love, and art will never be the
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Plum Wine
by Angela Davis-Gardner
Bottles of homemade plum wine link two worlds, two eras, and two lives through the eyes of Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching at a Tokyo university. When her surrogate mother, Michi, dies, Barbara inherits an extraordinary gift: a tansu chest filled with bottles of homemade plum wine wrapped in sheets of rice paper covered in elegant calligraphy—one bottle for each of the last twenty years of Michi’s life. Why did Michi leave her memoirs to Barbara, who cannot read Japanese? Seeking a translator, Barbara turns to an enigmatic pottery artist named Seiji, who will offer her a companionship as tender as it is forbidden. But as the two lovers unravel the mysteries of Michi’s life, a story that draws them through the aftermath of World War II and the hidden world of the hibakusha, Hiroshima survivors, Barbara begins to suspect that Seiji may be hiding the truth about Michi’s past—and a heartbreaking secret of his own.
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A Man of No Moon
by Jenny McPhee
From critically acclaimed author McPhee comes this lush novel set against theexotic backdrop of postwar Italy.
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Unforgettable
by Julie Ortolon
While trying to pull the town of Hope, Texas, out of bankruptcy, Jackson Hope must choose between the life he planned and the woman he has never been able to forget when she returns home, determined to save the old music hall before he tears it down.
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Bulls Island
by Dorothea Benton Frank
A satisfying tale of honor, chance, and star-crossed love infused with Southern wit, grace, and charm from the New York Times bestselling author Dorothea Benton Frank After twenty years, Elizabeth "Betts" McGee has finally managed to put her past behind her. She hasn't been home to beautiful South Carolina and untouched Bulls Island since the tragic night that ended her engagement to Charleston's golden boy, J. D. Langley. And why is that? Really, this is the story of two old Southern families. The Langley family has more money than the Morgan Stanley Bank. And they think they have more class. The Barrett family made their nineteenth-century fortune in a less distinguished manner—corner grocery stores and liquor stores. It's no surprise that when J.D. and Betts fall in love and decide to marry their parents are none too pleased. And when the love affair comes to an end, everyone is ready to place blame. Now twenty years have gone by and Betts, a top investment bank executive, must leave her comfortable life in New York City to return to the home she thought she'd left behind forever. But spearheading the most important project of her career puts her back in contact with everything she's tried so hard to forget: her estranged sister, her father, J.D., and her past. Once she's home, can Betts keep the secret that threatens all she holds dear? Or will her fear of the past wreck her future happiness? And what about that crazy gator? All will be revealed on Bulls Island.
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The Folded World
by Amity Gaige
Acclaimed author Gaige returns with this story of an idealistic young social worker drawn into the lives of his mentally ill clients, revealing the joys and devastations of life.
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Off Season
by Anne Rivers Siddons
"Anne Rivers Siddons tells the beautiful, tragic, and redemptive story of a woman who searches for meaning after her husband dies"--Provided by publisher.
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De Niro's Game
by Rawi Hage
WINNER OF THE 2008 INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY PRIZE De Niro’s Gameplunges readers into the timely story of two young men caught in Lebanon’s civil war. Bassam and George, best friends in childhood, have grown to adulthood in war-torn Beirut. Now they must choose their futures: to stay in the city and consolidate power through crime, or to go into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have known. Told in a distinctive, captivating voice that fuses vivid cinematic imagery and page-turning plot with the measured strength and beauty of Arabic poetry,De Niro’s Gameis an explosive portrait of life in a war zone, and a powerful meditation on what comes after.
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The Soul Thief
by Charles Baxter
A graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with the people around him--alluring but elusive Theresa, fickle Jamie, and Jerome Coolberg, an enigmatic figure who seems to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past.
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Walk On, Bright Boy
by Charles Davis
Written in the form of a confession by an elderly man looking back on the defining incident of his youth, set in a remote Spanish village during the Inquisition. As a young man, the narrator befriends a Moor, who entertains the village children with stories and songs, and introduces them to the spiritual joy of walking. When some of the children disappear, an Inquisitor arrives to find the perpetrator and very quickly accuses the Moor of being a witch.
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The Used World
by Haven Kimmel
The Used World Emporium is the sprawling antique store where Hazel, Claudia, and Rebekah pass their days surrounded by dusty furniture, cast-off clothes, and ancient housewares. But with the unexpected arrival of two babies--and the unfolding of not one but three love stories, each spanning generations--their formerly used world becomes new again. Heartrending, hilarious, and inspiring, this is the book that Kimmel's loyal fans have been waiting for--and it is certain to win her legions of new ones.
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Garden Spells
by Sarah Addison Allen
"Garden Spells" is a wonderful, enchanting, crafty novel of sisters--two very different women, each rooted in some way to her past--who discover that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree when family ties cast their spell.
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Trespass
by Valerie Martin
Chloe Dales's growing dislike of her college-age son Toby's romantic relationship with Salome Drago, a Croatian refugee who is a seductive but somehow toxic blend of the old world and the new, threatens to alienate her from her tolerant husband and besotted son.