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If You Liked...Where the Crawdads Sing
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Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende
Raised in the British colony of Valparaiso, Chile, after being abandoned as a baby, a pregnant Eliza follows her lover, Joaquin Andieta, to California at the height of the Gold Rush and finds adventure and adversity on her road to independence and love.
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The Postmistress
by Sarah Blake
The stories of a small Cape Cod postmistress and an American radio reporter stationed in London collide on the eve of the United States's entrance into World War II, a meeting that is shaped by a broken promise to deliver a letter.
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Tell the Wolves I'm Home
by Carol Rifka Brunt
Her world upended by the death of a beloved artist uncle who was the only person who understood her, 14-year-old June is mailed a teapot by her uncle's grieving friend, with whom June forges a poignant relationship. A first novel.
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The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.
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A Virtuous Woman
by Kaye Gibbons
When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.
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The Snow Child
by Eowyn Ivey
A childless couple working a farm in the brutal landscape of 1920 Alaska discover a little girl living in the wilderness, with a red fox as a companion, and begin to love the strange, almost-supernatural child as their own.
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Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
by Ruth Emmie Lang
Raised by wolves after being orphaned in childhood, a man with astonishing powers is evaluated by the people who care or wonder about him, including a woman who falls in love with him after he saves her from an angry wolf. A first novel.
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After This
by Alice McDermott
A vivid portrait of an American family during the middle decades of the twentieth century evokes the social, spiritual, and political turmoil of the era as seen through the experiences of a middle-class couple and their children, as they cope with the changing world around them.
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On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan
Recently married, a young couple--Florence, a talented musician and shy daughter of an aloof Oxford academic and a successful businessman, and Edward an earnest history student with little experience of women--looks forward to the future, but cannot help but worry about their upcoming wedding night. By the author of Atonement.
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Love and Ruin
by Paula McLain
The best-selling author of The Paris Wife returns to her fan-favorite subject, Ernest Hemingway, in a tale set on the eve of World War II that is inspired by his passionate, stormy marriage to a fiercely independent, ambitious young Martha Gellhorn, who would become one of the 20th century's leading war correspondents.
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Everything I Never Told You
by Celeste Ng
A first novel by a Pushcart Prize-winning writer explores the fallout of a favorite daughter's shattering death on a Chinese-American family in 1970s Ohio. A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
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The Gravedigger's Daughter
by Joyce Carol Oates
The daughter of a German high school teacher who was forced to work as a gravedigger after immigrating to upstate New York, Rebecca begins a life-changing pilgrimage throughout America in the wake of a prejudice-motivated tragedy.
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Swamplandia!
by Karen Russell
A first novel by the author of the short-story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves finds the Bigtree children struggling to protect their Florida Everglades alligator-wrestling theme park from a sophisticated competitor after losing their parents.
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My Absolute Darling
by Gabriel Tallent
Enduring an isolated existence after the death of her mother, 14-year-old Turtle roams the rocky shores and tide pools of the California coast and refutes every outside attempt to engage her before an unexpected friendship with a newcomer helps her realize the vulnerabilities of her life with her charismatic father.
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The Shoemaker's Wife
by Adriana Trigiani
This intricately woven tapestry of love and family, war and loss, risk and destiny follows star-crossed lovers Enza, a practical beauty, and Ciro, a strapping mountain boy, who, after their first meeting in the Italian Alps, find their destinies inexplicably entwined as they build their lives in America.
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The Hummingbird's Daughter
by Luis Alberto Urrea
When sixteen-year-old Teresita, the illegitimate and beloved daughter of a powerful late-nineteenth-century rancher, arises from death possessing the power to heal, she is declared a saint and finds her family and faith tested by the impending Mexican civil war. By the author of The Devil's Highway.
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The Good Dream
by Donna VanLiere
Denounced by her 1950 Tennessee community as an old maid, 30-something Ivorie Walker hides her loneliness and grief over her mother's death behind good-humored independence before advocating on behalf of a feral boy who has been stealing vegetables from her garden.
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Where the Line Bleeds
by Jesmyn Ward
A tale set on the post-Katrina Gulf Coast finds the bond between twins Joshua and Christophe strained by the latter's decision to sell drugs, a situation that is further complicated by the returns of the mother who had abandoned them and predatory addict father.
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For more suggestions, visit www.messengerpl.org.
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