Catalog Search Results
1) Swamplandia!
Author
Pub. Date
2011
Language
English
Description
This novel takes us to the swamps of the Florida Everglades, and introduces us to Ava Bigtree, an unforgettable young heroine. The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator wrestling theme park, formerly no. 1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable headliner, has just died; her...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan's debut novel--now widely regarded as a modern classic--examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between these four women and their American-born daughters."--Publisher's description....
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-- not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys--best friends--are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"A beautiful edition of the groundbreaking classic novel, with a new introduction by award-winning writer Susan Choi. "Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf comments on the most pressing dramas of our human predicament: war, mortality, family, love." -Rick Moody, bestselling author of The Ice Storm. The enduring power of this iconic classic flows from the brilliance of its narrative technique and the...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Riveting and unconventional, The Last Story of Mina Lee traces the far-reaching consequences of secrets in the lives of a Korean immigrant mother and her daughter. Margot Lee's mother is ignoring her calls. Margot can't understand why, until she makes a surprise trip home to Koreatown, LA, and finds that her mother has suspiciously died. Determined to discover the truth, Margot unravels her single mother's past as a Korean War orphan and an undocumented...
6) Torch
Author
Language
English
Description
Grounded in the everyday particulars of life in a small town, leavened by earthy humor, this book presents the saga of a family coming to terms with death--a tale of love and loss, grief and redemption set in rural Minnesota.
Author
Series
Dave Robicheaux novels volume 11
Language
English
Description
Dave's search for his mother's killers leads him to the darker places in his past, and solving this case teaches him what it means to be his mother's son.
8) Housekeeping
Author
Language
English
Description
"A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother. The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"On the occasion of her 46th birthday, Caroline Wimbley Levine is concerned about filling the large shoes of her late, force-of-nature mother, Miss Lavinia, the former Queen of Tall Pines Plantation. Still, Caroline loves a challenge - and she simply will not be fazed by the myriad family catastrophes surrounding her. She'll deal with brother Trip's tricky romantic entanglements, son Eric and his mysterious girlfriend, and go toe-to-toe with alcoholic...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In a riveting new thriller from America's Queen of Suspense, a young woman is ensnared into returning to a place she had wanted to leave behind forever -- her childhood home. There, at the age of ten, Liza Barton had shot her mother, trying desperately to protect her from her estranged step-father, Ted Cartwright. Despite his claim that the shooting was a deliberate act, the Juvenile Court ruled the death an accident. Many people, however, agreed...
11) In her shoes
Author
Language
English
Description
Meet Rose Feller. She's thirty years old and a high-powered attorney with a secret passion for romance novels. She dreams of a man who will slide off her glasses, gaze into her eyes, and tell her that she's beautiful. She also dreams of getting her fantastically screwed-up little sister to get her life together. Meet Rose's sister, Maggie. Twenty-eight years old, drop-dead gorgeous and only occasionally employed. Although her dreams of big-screen...
12) Good riddance
Author
Language
English
Description
"In a delightful new romantic comedy from Elinor Lipman, one woman's trash becomes another woman's treasure, with deliriously entertaining results. Daphne Maritch doesn't quite know what to make of the heavily annotated high school yearbook she inherits from her mother, who held this relic dear. Too dear.The late June Winter Maritch was the teacher to whom the class of '69 had dedicated its yearbook, and in turn she went on to attend every reunion,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"Life and a dismal last name are the only two things Beyah Grim's parents ever gave her. After carving her path all on her own, Beyah is well on her way to bigger and better things, thanks to no one but herself. With only two short months separating her from the future she's built and the past she desperately wants to leave behind, an unexpected death leaves Beyah with no place to go during the interim. Forced to reach out to her last resort, Beyah...
Author
Series
Book of Lost Things volume 1
Language
English
Description
Mourning the loss of his mother, David finds comfort in the books she left behind. But soon the make-believe world of the books melds with David's reality, and the figments of his imagination become startlingly real.
Author
Series
Modern library paperbacks volume P14
Language
English
Description
In this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to live with the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at Skully's Landing, the decaying mansion in rural Alabama, his father is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his morose stepmother, Amy, eccentric cousin Randolph, and a defiant little girl named Idabel, who soon offers Joel the love and approval...
Author
Language
English
Description
At twenty-six, Emma Roberts comes to the painful realization that if she is ever to become truly independent, she must leave her comfortable London flat and venture into the wider world. This entails not only breaking free from a claustrophobic relationship with her mother, but also shedding her inherited tendency toward melancholy. Once settled in a small Paris hotel, Emma befriends Françoise Desnoyers, a vibrant young woman who offers
...Author
Language
English
Description
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.
Dorothy Baker’s entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events...
Dorothy Baker’s entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events...
18) Panic
Author
Language
English
Description
From New York Times bestselling author Jeff Abbott...
What if everything about your life was a lie?
Evan Casher is a successful documentary filmmaker with a perfect life--until the day his mother is brutally murdered. Suddenly pursued by a ruthless circle of killers, Evan discovers his entire past has been a carefully constructed lie. With only one chance at survival and no one he can trust, Evan must discover the shocking truth about his family--and...
19) The cactus
Author
Language
English
Description
"In this charming and poignant debut, one woman's unconventional journey to finding love means learning to embrace the unexpected. For Susan Green, messy emotions don't fit into the equation of her perfectly ordered life. She has a flat that is ideal for one, a job that suits her passion for logic, and an "interpersonal arrangement" that provides cultural and other, more intimate, benefits. But suddenly confronted with the loss of her mother and the...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A heartrending new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. "Richard Powers, whose novels combine the wonders of science with the marvels of art, astonishes us in different ways with each new book." -Heller McAlpin, NPR Books. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife....
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