Some Super Books so Sublime
Discover a curated list of Some Super Books so Sublime—explore sublime and super reads that inspire, entertain, and transform. Find your next favorite book today!

Book
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
by Lisa See
A language kept a secret for a thousand years forms the backdrop for an unforgettable novel of two Chinese women whose friendship and love sustains them through their lives.

Book
The Traveler
by John Twelve Hawks
Their lives shaped by their father's role as a Traveler, an elite prophet able to attain pure enlightenment, Gabriel and Michael Corrigan become a target of the Tabulas, a ruthless cadre seeking world domination.
Item Not Found
ID: 0425205800
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0060506725
(Type: books)

Book
Freddy and Fredericka
by Mark Helprin
Ridiculed by the British press, Prince of Wales Freddy and his wife, the frivolous Fredericka, are sent to colonize the barbaric land of America, during which they engage in a freight train ride, an art theft, and a wayward presidential election.
Item Not Found
ID: 0747575886
(Type: books)


Book
Eventide
by Kent Haruf
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning, bestselling author of Plainsong returns to the high-plains town of Holt, Colorado, with a novel that unveils the immemorial truths about human beings: their fragility and resilience, their selfishness and goodness, and their ability to find family in one another. • "Storytelling at its best.” —Entertainment Weekly The aging McPheron brothers are learning to live without Victoria Roubideaux, the single mother they took in and who has now left their ranch to start college. A lonely young boy stoically cares for his grandfather while a disabled couple tries to protect their a violent relative. As these lives unfold and intersect, Eventide reveals Kent Haruf as a novelist of masterful authority. “Stunning.... The dry, cold air of Colorado's high plains seems to intensify the light Kent Haruf shines on every character in his masterful novel.... A book of hope, hope as plain and hard-won as Haruf's keenly styled prose.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
Item Not Found
ID: 1841956538
(Type: books)

Book
The Swallows of Kabul
by Yasmina Khadra
Set in Afghanistan's capital city of Kabul, this extraordinary novel "puts a human face on the suffering inflicted by the Taliban" (San Francisco Chronicle), taking readers into the seemingly divergent lives of two couples—and depicting with compassion and exquisite details the mentality of Islamic fundamentalists and the complexities of the Muslim world. Mohsen comes from a family of wealthy shopkeepers whom the Taliban has destroyed; Zunaira, his wife, exceedingly beautiful, was once a brilliant teacher and is now no longer allowed to leave her home without an escort or covering her face. Intersecting their world is Atiq, a prison keeper, a man who has sincerely adopted the Taliban ideology and struggles to keep his faith, and his wife, Musarrat, who once rescued Atiq and is now dying of sickness and despair. Desperate, exhausted Mohsen wanders through Kabul when he is surrounded by a crowd about to stone an adulterous woman. Numbed by the hysterical atmosphere and drawn into their rage, he too throws stones at the face of the condemned woman buried up to her waist. With this gesture the lives of all four protagonists move toward their destinies. Yasmina Khadra brings readers into the hot, dusty streets of Kabul and offers them an unflinching but compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair.
Item Not Found
ID: 0060556587
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0743267672
(Type: books)

Book
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
by Lydia Millet
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart plucks the three scientists who were key to the invention of the atom bomb—Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi—as they watch history's first mushroom cloud rise over the desert on July 16th, 1945...and places them down in modern-day Santa Fe. One by one, the scientists are spotted by a shy librarian who becomes convinced of their authenticity. Entranced, bewildered, overwhelmed by their significance as historical markers on the one hand, and their peculiar personalities on the other, she, to the dismay of her husband, devotes herself to them. Soon the scientists acquire a sugar daddy—a young pothead millionaire from Tokyo who bankrolls them. Heroes to some, lunatics or con artists to others, the scientists finally become messianic religious figureheads to fanatics, who believe Oppenheimer to be the Second Coming. As the ever-growing convoy traverses the country in a fleet of RV's on a pilgrimage to the UN, the scientists wrestle with the legacy of their invention and their growing celebrity, while Ann and her husband struggle with the strain on their marriage, a personal journey married to a history of thermonuclear weapons.

Book
How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets
by Garth Stein
Evan had a hit single. But that was 10 years ago. Now 31, he's drifting, playing in a local band and teaching middle-aged guys to coax music from electric guitars. Beset at a young age by a life-threatening form of epilepsy, he's kept his condition a secret, even from his bandmates, only his family know, but they don't know about the accident that caused it. Offbeat and disarming, How Evan Broke His Head portrays a contemporary American family with unfailing and unflinching honesty.
Item Not Found
ID: 1582345066
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0446694584
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0670034118
(Type: books)

Book
Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Told in four distinct voices, the winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2004 is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, encapsulating the most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.

Item Not Found
ID: 1578567416
(Type: books)


Book
The Confessions of Max Tivoli
by Andrew Sean Greer
Born as an old man, Max Tivoli lives his life aging backwards, falling in love and living an odd, sometimes terrifying life in San Francisco at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Book
You Remind Me of Me
by Dan Chaon
With his critically acclaimed Among the Missing and Fitting Ends, award-winning author Dan Chaon proved himself a master of the short story form. He is a writer, observes the Chicago Tribune, who can “convincingly squeeze whole lives into a mere twenty pages or so.” Now Chaon marshals his notable talents in his much-anticipated debut novel. You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better. With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and circumstance: Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable? In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of “ordinary” people.
