Some Gripping Fiction You Cant Put Down
Discover gripping fiction you can't put down—from McCarthy's *The Road* to Murakami's *Kafka on the Shore*. Explore unforgettable novels, thrilling page-turners, and masterful storytelling in this curated book list.
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Past Perfect
by Susan Isaacs
Having been fired from her CIA dream job without an explanation thirteen years earlier, cable television writer Katie Schottland is enlisted for help by a former colleague who offers insight into the mystery of Katie's dismissal. By the author of Any Place I Hang My Hat. 150,000 first printing.
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You're Not You
by Michelle Wildgen
Egypt is as old as history itself. It is home to some of the world's greatest treasures, a pantheon of dazzling gods and kings, and the roots of the civilised world. Today it is the political and cultural heart of the Arab world and a country of startling contrasts and contradictions. River in the Desertis Paul William Roberts' account of his travels through Egypt, delving into the hidden depths of this great country - at once familiar and yet unknown. Setting out to explore every facet ofancient and modern Egypt, Roberts encounters magicians, politicians, monks and archaeologists. In Cairo he spends a terrifying night alone in the central chamber of the Great Pyramid and is smuggled into the clandestine gathering of a Sufi tariqa. In Nubia he is carried by boat to the great temple of Isis at Philae and reads Death on the Nilewhilst sleeping in Agatha Christie's bedroom. He embarks on an eventful voyage up the Nile from Aswan to Luxor,
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House of Meetings
by Martin Amis
Relates the tale of two brothers and a Jewish girl in a Russian slave labor camp in 1946.
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Once Upon a Day
by Lisa Tucker
From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of "Shout Down the Moon" and "The Song Readers" comes a wise, humorous, and deeply compassionate story about the risks and rewards of loving when a single day can change one's life.
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The March
by E. L. Doctorow
In the last years of the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting a 60-mile wide swath of pillage and destruction. That event comes back in this magisterial novel. High school & older.
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The Painted Veil
by William Somerset Maugham
Kitty Fane's affair with Assistant Colonial Secretary Townsend is interrupted when she is taken from Hong Kong by her vengeful bacteriologist husband to work in a cholera epidemic.
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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 Doctor's Daughter
by Hilma Wolitzer
The Doctor's Daughter is a haunting portrait of a woman coming to terms with her family history and the fallibility of memory.
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Espresso Tales
by Alexander McCall Smith
44 SCOTLAND STREET - Book 2 The residents and neighbors of 44 Scotland Street and the city of Edinburgh come to vivid life in these gently satirical, wonderfully perceptive serial novels, featuring six-year-old Bertie, a remarkably precocious boy—just ask his mother. Back are all our favorite denizens of a Georgian townhouse in Edinburgh. Bertie the immensely talented six year old is now enrolled in kindergarten, and much to his dismay, has been clad in pink overalls for his first day of class. Bruce has lost his job as a surveyor, and between admiring glances in the mirror, is contemplating becoming a wine merchant. Pat is embarking on a new life at Edinburgh University and perhaps on a new relationship, courtesy of Domenica, her witty and worldly-wise neighbor. McCall Smith has much in store for them as the brief spell of glorious summer sunshine gives way to fall a season cursed with more traditionally Scottish weather. Full of McCall Smith’s gentle humor and sympathy for his characters, Espresso Tales is also an affectionate portrait of a city and its people who, in the author’s own words, “make it one of the most vibrant and interesting places in the world.”
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March
by Geraldine Brooks
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize--a powerful love story set against the backdrop of the Civil War, from the author of The Secret Chord. From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks's place as a renowned author of historical fiction.
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Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks
"When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes, we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice. Convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village boundaries to arrest the spread of the disease. But as death reaches into every household, faith frays. When villagers turn from prayers and herbal cures to sorcery and murderous witch-hunting, Anna must confront the deaths of family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As she struggles to survive, a year of plague becomes, instead, annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders.' Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged mountain spine of England. Year of Wonders is a detailed evocation of a singular moment in history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and one of the world’s greatest storytellers comes “an insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (The New Yorker) about a teenager on the run and a deceptively simple old man. Now with a new introduction by the author. Here we meet fifteen-year-old runaway Kafka Tamura and the elderly Nakata, who is drawn to Kafka for reasons that he cannot fathom. As their paths converge, acclaimed author Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder, in what is a truly remarkable journey. “As powerful as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.... Reading Murakami ... is a striking experience in consciousness expansion.”—Chicago Tribune
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Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love. Now with a new introduction by the author. Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.
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The Mermaid Chair
by Sue Monk Kidd
A transcendent tale of a woman's self-discovery—the New York Times–bestselling second work of fiction by the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings Inside the church of a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. When Jessie Sullivan is summoned home to the island to cope with her eccentric mother’s seemingly inexplicable behavior, she is living a conventional life with her husband, Hugh, a life “molded to the smallest space possible.” Jessie loves Hugh, but once on the island, she finds herself drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk about to take his final vows. Amid a rich community of unforgettable island women and the exotic beauty of marshlands, tidal creeks, and majestic egrets, Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, with a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right, and with the immutable force of home and marriage. Is the power of the mermaid chair only a myth? Or will it alter the course of Jessie’s life? What happens will unlock the roots of her mother’s tormented past, but most of all, it will allow Jessie to discover selfhood and a place of belonging as she explores the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic.
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One Thousand White Women
by Jim Fergus
Based on an actual historical event but told through fictional diaries, this is the story of May Dodd—a remarkable woman who, in 1875, travels through the American West to marry the chief of the Cheyenne Nation. One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd’s journey into an unknown world. Having been committed to an insane asylum by her blue-blood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope for freedom and redemption is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from “civilized” society become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. What follows is a series of breathtaking adventures—May’s brief, passionate romance with the gallant young army captain John Bourke; her marriage to the great chief Little Wolf; and her conflict of being caught between loving two men and living two completely different lives. “Fergus portrays the perceptions and emotions of women...with tremendous insight and sensitivity.”—Booklist “A superb tale of sorrow, suspense, exultation, and triumph.” —Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
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For One More Day
by Mitch Albom
This is the story of Charley, a child of divorce who is always forced to choose between his mother and his father. He grows into a man and starts a family of his own. But one fateful weekend, he leaves his mother to secretly be with his father - and she dies while he is gone. This haunts him for years. It unravels his own young family. It leads him to depression and drunkenness. One night, he decides to take his life. But somewhere between this world and the next, he encounters his mother again, in their hometown, and gets to spend one last day with her - the day he missed and always wished he'd had. He asks the questions many of us yearn to ask, the questions we never ask while our parents are alive. By the end of this magical day, Charley discovers how little he really knew about his mother, the secret of how her love saved their family, and how deeply he wants the second chance to save his own.
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All Aunt Hagar's Children
by Edward P. Jones
In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them. In the title story, in which Jones employs the first-person rhythms of a classic detective story, a Korean War veteran investigates the death of a family friend whose sorry destiny seems inextricable from his mother's own violent Southern childhood. In "In the Blink of God's Eye" and "Tapestry" newly married couples leave behind the familiarity of rural life to pursue lives of urban promise only to be challenged and disappointed. With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw away and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.
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The Mercy of Thin Air
by Ronlyn Domingue
Following her death in 1920s New Orleans, beautiful Raziela chooses to remain in The Between--a place between life and death--rather than pass on to what lies ahead, hoping to find out what happened to her beloved Andrew.
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When Madeline was Young
by Jane Hamilton
"Inspired in part by Elizabeth Spencer's Light in the Piazza, Hamilton offers an honest portrait of how a family tragedy forever shapes and alters the boundaries of love."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Meaning of Night
by Michael Cox
Convinced that he is destined for great wealth, power, and influence, Edward Glyver will do anything to reclaim a prize that is rightfully his, including a showdown with his rival, poet-criminal Phoebus Rainsford Daunt.
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Pompeii
by Robert Harris
BESTSELLER - "Terrific... gripping... A literally shattering climax." -- The New York Times Book Review All along the Mediterranean coast, the Roman empire’s richest citizens are relaxing in their luxurious villas, enjoying the last days of summer. The world’s largest navy lies peacefully at anchor in Misenum. The tourists are spending their money in the seaside resorts of Baiae, Herculaneum, and Pompeii. But the carefree lifestyle and gorgeous weather belie an impending cataclysm, and only one man is worried. The young engineer Marcus Attilius Primus has just taken charge of the Aqua Augusta, the enormous aqueduct that brings fresh water to a quarter of a million people in nine towns around the Bay of Naples. His predecessor has disappeared. Springs are failing for the first time in generations. And now there is a crisis on the Augusta’ s sixty-mile main line—somewhere to the north of Pompeii, on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Attilius—decent, practical, and incorruptible—promises Pliny, the famous scholar who commands the navy, that he can repair the aqueduct before the reservoir runs dry. His plan is to travel to Pompeii and put together an expedition, then head out to the place where he believes the fault lies. But Pompeii proves to be a corrupt and violent town, and Attilius soon discovers that there are powerful forces at work—both natural and man-made—threatening to destroy him. With his trademark elegance and intelligence, Robert Harris, bestselling author of Archangel and Fatherland, re-creates a world on the brink of disaster.
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Imperium
by Robert Harris
A tale inspired by the writings of Tiro, Cicero's confidential secretary, traces the life of the ancient Roman orator from his beginnings as a young lawyer through his competitions with Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus in the political arena.
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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Passenger, coming October '22.
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The God of Animals
by Aryn Kyle
Based on the author's short story titled "The Foaling Season," the tale of rancher's daughter Alice Winston finds her helping to support the family business by boarding the horses of rich neighbors and leaving behind the innocence of her youth.
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The Raw Shark Texts
by Steven Hall
Eric Sanderson wakes up in a place he doesn't recognise, unable to remember who he is. Attacked by a force he cannot see and confronted with memories he cannot ignore, Eric discovers he is being hunted by a psychic predator, a shark. This creature may exist only in his mind, but it soon starts making some very real appearances in his world. Loaded with letters from his past self, each signed 'With regret and also hope, The First Eric Sanderson', Eric embarks on a quest to recover his life. A love story, an adventure, a psychological drama - this wild, touching, modern tale is cut through with an understated humour and warmth. The depths of love, language, memory and the inevitability of loss have never been plumbed with such deep-hearted imagination.
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Body Surfing
by Anita Shreve
Struggling to start over again after being divorced and widowed while still in her twenties, Sydney tutors the daughter of a wealthy couple during a New Hampshire summer but finds herself caught up in a bitter family squabble involving her charge's two grown brothers. By the author of The Pilot's Wife.
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Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
A cloth bag containing ten copies of the title, that may also include a folder with miscellaneous notes, discussion questions, biographical information, and reading lists to assist book group discussion leaders.
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Heyday
by Kurt Andersen
Englishman Benjamin Knowles heads for America to build a new life and joins up with three young Americans--journalist Timothy Skaggs, war veteran Duff Lucking, and Duff's actress sister, Polly--to seek their fortunes in the gold fields of California.
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My Sister's Keeper
by Jodi Picoult
Written with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity, this novel is about a teen who was conceived as a bone marrow match for her sister Kate, and what happens when she begins to question who she really is.
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The Last of Her Kind
by Sigrid Nunez
Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. A decade later, Ann is convicted of murder, and Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work.
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Zoli
by Colum McCann
As fascism spreads across 1930s Europe, Zoli Novotna, a young Gypsy poet, and her grandfather seek refuge with a clan of Romani harpists, where her fame as a poet leads to a flight to the West as she struggles to find where she truly belongs.
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The List
by Tara Ison
Isabel, an aspiring medical student, and Al, a failed movie director working as a video store clerk, fall into an on-again, off-again sex-driven relationship that they decide to end for good by making a list of ten things they always meant to do together and checking them off, but at the end of the list they are still not ready to call it quits and their good intentions degenerate into an excuse for increasingly violent revenge.
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Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
by Paul Torday
A meek, slightly pompous, middle-aged scientist working at London's National Centre for Fisheries Excellence, Dr. Alfred Jones takes on the outlandish--and ill-fated--task of introducing the sport of salmon fishing into the Yemen River at the behest of a mysterious sheikh, in a whimsical novel of administrative bureaucracy, political spin, and government dysfunction.
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To My Dearest Friends
by Patricia Volk
Two unlikely women--Nanny, a Manhattan real-estate agent, and Alice, the prim owner of a boutique--are thrown together by the death of their mutual best friend, Roberta, as they attempt to unravel the truth about Roberta's previously unknown lover.
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The Canyon of Bones
by Richard S. Wheeler
Working as a guide for wealthy Englishman Graves Duplessis Mercer, mountain man Barnaby Skye finds their lives in danger when they visit a Missouri River valley filled with gigantic fossils of ancient monsters, a region sacred to local tribes.
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The King of Colored Town
by Darryl Wimberley
In their moving and intertwined drama two African-American teens endure the backlash following the integration of their segregated school with the all-white school run by Lafayette County's all-white school board.