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Christina's Favorite Historical/Cultural Fiction
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Click on any title or cover to find the item in the SWAN Online Catalog.
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In the Time of the Butterflies
by Julia Alvarez
A fictional account of the young lives of Mirabal sisters Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa, otherwise known in the Dominican Republic as Las Mariposas, describes their suffering and martyrdom in the last days of the Trujillo dictatorship.
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The Red Tent : a novel
by Anita Diamant
In a story based on the Book of Genesis, Jacob's only daughter, Dinah, shares her unique perspective on the origins of many of our modern religious practices and sexual politics, eager to impart the lessons in endurance and humanity she has learned from her father's wives.
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Memoirs of a Geisha : a novel
by Arthur Golden
The "memoirs" of one of Japan's most celebrated geishas describes how, in 1929, as a little girl, she is sold into slavery; her efforts to learn the arts of the geisha; the impact of World War II; and her struggle to reinvent herself to win the man she loves.
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Water for Elephants : a novel
by Sara Gruen
Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.
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The Lowland : a novel
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Frequently mistaken for one another in spite of very different natures, brothers Subhash and Udayan Mitra pursue respective lives in rebellion-torn 1960s Calcutta until a shattering tragedy compels Subhash to return to India, where he endeavors to heal family wounds. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Unaccustomed Earth.
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Shunned by the town's prosperous black families, as well as its white families, Pecola lives with her alcoholic father and embittered, overworked mother in a shabby two-room storefront that reeks of the hopeless destitution that overwhelms their lives. In awe of her clean well-groomed schoolmates, and certain of her own intense ugliness, Pecola tries to make herself disappear as she wishes fervently, desperately for the blue eyes of a white girl.
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Jazz
by Toni Morrison
Set in Harlem in the 1920s, this novel chronicles a bittersweet triangle involving a middle-aged door-to-door salesman, his mentally unstable wife, and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend. By the author of Beloved.
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My Name is Asher Lev
by Chaim Potok
The National Jewish Book Award-winning novel records the anguish, dreams, and triumphs of Asher Lev, a talented young painter raised in a cloistered Hasidic community in Brooklyn, as he struggles to resolve his gift of art with his religious background only to emerge into the great world of art, rejecting all else.
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The Bonesetter's Daughter
by Amy Tan
Struggling to regain her voice and express her true feelings to her husband, ghostwriter Ruth Young discovers that her inability to speak closely parallels the story of her mother LuLing's early life in China.
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The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author's works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.
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