Stone Cold Good Fiction
Discover the best cold fiction stone books with 'Stone Cold Good Fiction.' Explore gripping tales, chilling mysteries, and thrilling reads in this curated list of top picks.
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The Year the Music Changed
by Diane Coulter Thomas
A lonely 14-year-old fires off a fan letter to an unknown 20-year-old country singer named Elvis Presley, launching an intimate, touching correspondence that chronicles Achsa and Elvis' coming of age as artists and individuals.
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The Widow of the South
by Robert Hicks
A story based on the true experiences of a Civil War heroine finds Carrie McGavock witnessing the bloodshed of the Battle of Franklin, falling in love with a wounded man, and dedicating her home as a burial site for fallen soldiers.
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In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
by Alexander McCall Smith
Precious Ramotswe finds herself overburdened at the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and faces more complications when she finds a strange intruder in her house and a mysterious pumpkin in her yard.
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Shalimar the Clown
by Salman Rushdie
In this gripping international tale of love and revenge, and the ancient and modern conflicts from which they spring, a murder looks at first like a political assassination, but turns out to be passionately personal.
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The Interruption of Everything
by Terry McMillan
An African-American woman in her forties discovers that the unplanned life may be the best.
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The Painted Drum
by Louise Erdrich
When a woman named Faye Travers is called upon to appraise the estate of a family in her small New Hampshire town, she isn't surprised to discover a forgotten cache of valuable Native American artifacts. After all, the family descends from an Indian agent who worked on the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that is home to her mother's family. However, she stops dead in her tracks when she finds in the collection a rare drum -- a powerful yet delicate object, made from a massive moose skin stretched across a hollow of cedar, ornamented with symbols she doesn't recognize and dressed in red tassels and a beaded belt and skirt -- especially since, without touching the instrument, she hears it sound. From Faye's discovery, we trace the drum's passage both backward and forward in time, from the reservation on the northern plains to New Hampshire and back. Through the voice of Bernard Shaawano, an Ojibwe, we hear how his grandfather fashioned the drum after years of mourning his young daughter's death, and how it changes the lives of those whose paths its crosses. And through Faye we hear of her anguished relationship with a local sculptor, who himself mourns the loss of a daughter, and of the life she has made alone with her mother, in the shadow of the death of Faye's sister. Through these compelling voices, The Painted Drum explores the strange power that lost children exert on the memories of those they leave behind, and as the novel unfolds, its elegantly crafted narrative comes to embody the intricate, transformative rhythms of human grief. One finds throughout the grace and wit, the captivating prose and surprising beauty, that characterize Louise Erdrich's finest work.
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Adored
by Tilly Bagshawe
To the outside world, Siena McMahon has a fairy-tale life. Born into a great Hollywood dynasty-granddaughter of movie legend Duke McMahon, daughter of billionaire producer Pete McMahon-she is blessed with beauty, brains, and wealth...a proverbial princess. Yet behind the wrought-iron gates of the sprawling McMahon mansion in Hancock Park, her life is far from idyllic. The McMahons are bound together not by love but by infighting and ambition. When a gold-digging English aristocrat, Caroline Berkeley, worms her way into their lives and their home, the family's potent mix of jealousy and wealth explodes. Packed off to school in England, Siena starts making plans to leave the moment she arrives. She is determined to become a Hollywood star in her own right-just as her grandfather had said she would be. And once back in L.A., the rejections, betrayals, and failures she'll face will only make her stronger and tougher than ever before. But at what price? In the utterly dysfunctional landscape of her life-among friends, lovers, and family-she must find the people who will help her survive, help her become the person she was meant to be, help her be truly Adored. Set in the most glamorous cities of the world-L.A., London, Paris, and New York-Tilly Bagshawe's debut novel is like the real-world Hollywood it mirrors: deliciously escapist, wickedly sexy, and always irresistibly compelling.
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72 Hour Hold
by Bebe Moore Campbell
Fed up with the mental health community and desperate to save her daughter, who is suffering from bipolar disorder, Keri enlists the assistance of the Program, an illegal group of radicals who have rejected the established psychiatric system.
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The Loss of Leon Meed
by Josh Emmons
Emmons pens a highly imaginative debut novel about a town full of varied characters whose lives converage and change when they encounter a mysterious, disappearing man.
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Kingston by Starlight
by Christopher John Farley
Anne Bonny travels to the West Indies following the death of her mother, masquerading as a man to become a sailor under the command of Calico Jack Rackam, in a fictional portrait of the eighteenth-century, Irish-born woman pirate.
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Envy
by Kathryn Harrison
A New York psychoanalyst in the midst of a midlife crisis, William Moreland comes face to face with a woman he had loved twenty-five years earlier during a college reunion, an encounter that leads to shocking revelations about their relationship.
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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.
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No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
When he stumbles upon a bloody massacre, a cache of heroin, and more than two million in cash during a hunting trip, Llewelyn Moss removes the money, a decision that draws him and his young wife into the middle of a violent confrontation.
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Why Are You Doing This?
by Jason
In this deadpan, Hitchcock-meets-Jarmusch thriller, a moody twenty-something wallowing in post-breakup depression finds himself drawn into a paranoid's worst nightmare after his best friend is murdered and the blame is pinned on him.
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Nadia's Song
by Soheir Khashoggi
After a romance with her wealthy employer's son renders her a heartbroken single mother, servant girl Karima Ismail eventually achieves stardom as one of Egypt's most famous singers, but her life is shattered by her daughter's disappearance.
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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.
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Zorro
by Isabel Allende
A swashbuckling adventure story that reveals for the first time how Diego de la Vega became the masked man we all know so well Born in southern California late in the eighteenth century, he is a child of two worlds. Diego de la Vega's father is an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner; his mother, a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe while receiving from his father lessons in the art of fencing and in cattle branding. It is here, during Diego's childhood, filled with mischief and adventure, that he witnesses the brutal injustices dealt Native Americans by European settlers and first feels the inner conflict of his heritage. At the age of sixteen, Diego is sent to Barcelona for a European education. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego follows the example of his celebrated fencing master and joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor. With this tumultuous period as a backdrop, Diego falls in love, saves the persecuted, and confronts for the first time a great rival who emerges from the world of privilege. Between California and Barcelona, the New World and the Old, the persona of Zorro is formed, a great hero is born, and the legend begins. After many adventures -- duels at dawn, fierce battles with pirates at sea, and impossible rescues -- Diego de la Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, returns to America to reclaim the hacienda on which he was raised and to seek justice for all who cannot fight for it themselves.
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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.
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Ya-Yas in Bloom
by Rebecca Wells
Follows the childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood of Vivi, Teensy, Caro, and Necie from the time they first meet in the 1930s through their many experiences and years of friendship.
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The History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive. But it wasn't always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book. . . . Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).
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Everything Is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
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Hissy Fit
by Mary Kay Andrews
Keeley Murdock's wedding to A.J. Jernigan should have been the social event of the season. But all bets are off when she catches her fiancÉ doing the deed with her maid of honor at the country club rehearsal dinner. The wedding's off, too, as Keeley pitches the hissy fit of the century, earning herself instant notoriety in the small town of Madison, Georgia. Now A.J.'s unscrupulous banking family is bringing financial pressure to bear on Keeley's interior design business. But a redheaded stranger in a vintage yellow Cadillac is riding to her rescue. Will Mahoney, the new owner of a failing local bra plant, is about to offer the designing woman just what she needs: a plum decorating assignment, a chance to clear her name, and a golden opportunity to give her cheating varmint of an ex-fiancÉ the comeuppance he so richly deserves.
