Frazier, Charles
Thirteen Moons
In the 19th-century, a 12-year-old boy named Will is dispatched on a man-size mission. Given only a horse, a key, and a map, this callow youth is sent alone into Indian country to run a trading post. Thrust into a frontier society where everything is uncertain, Will places his allegiance on the side of the embattled Cherokees and his love in the elusive hands of a young woman he won in a card game.

Picoult, Jodi
My Sister’s Keeper
Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate, a life and a role that she
has never challenged...until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is and makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable: a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.

Lahiri, Jhumpa
The Namesake
Gogol is so named because his father believes that sitting up in a sleeping car reading Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" saved him when the train he was on derailed and most passengers perished. After his arranged marriage, the man and his wife leave India for America, where he eventually becomes a professor. The tale comes full circle when the protagonist, home for a Bengali Christmas, rediscovers his father's gift of Gogol's stories.

Wasserman, Robin
Hacking Harvard
Is it possible to fight the system…the college admissions system? Can three 17-year old super geeks hack into Harvard’s admissions system and get a complete slacker in? Three brilliant nerds—Max Kim, Eric Roth, and Isaac "The Professor" Schwarzbaum—bet $20,000 that they can get anyone into Harvard. They take on the Ivy League in their quest for popularity, money, and the love of Lexi, a beauty queen valedictorian, who demands to be in on the plot.

Guterson, David
Snow Falling on Cedars
In 1954, a murder trial in an island community off the coast of Washington state broadens into an exploration of war and race. The dead man, Heine, his accused murderer, Miyomoto, and the one-man staff of the local newspaper, Chambers, were all scarred by their experiences in World War II. The reporter, alone and alienated by the loss of an arm and a childhood love—and has married Miyomoto—comes upon information that could alter the verdict of the trial or change his own life. He is faced with a monumental decision.

Danticat, Edwidge
Brother, I’m Dying
This major work of nonfiction from an award-winning fiction writer traces Danticat’s journey from her childhood in Haiti living in her uncle’s house to join her immigrant parents in Brooklyn. She is torn between the challenges of a new life in the U.S. and her fears for her old family amidst the deteriorating political situation back in Haiti. Which is the greater sacrifice: to stay or to go?

Dallas, Sandra
Tallgrass
13-year old Rennie Stroud is growing up in a backwater town in Colorado during World War II. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S government opens up an internment camp, Tallgrass, in her town. Relations between the internees and the locals are varied, but worsen after a young girl is murdered. Tallgrass is part mystery, part historical fiction, and part coming-of-age story that is grippingly told.

Hamilton, Masha
The Camel Bookmobile
New York librarian Fiona Sweeney makes a dramatic change in her life by heading off to Africa as part of a project to take books to nomadic peoples in remote parts of Kenya. In one village she witnesses a power struggle between those who favor modernization and others who cling to traditional ways and she begins to realize how much she is a product of Western values. Although she succeeds in finding romance and adventure, it may have come at the expense of the people she was trying to help.

Auchincloss, Louis
The Headmaster’s Dilemma
New England prep school Averhill is changing with the times (it's the 1970s), thanks in large part to the popular and progressive headmaster Michael Sayre. But he runs afoul of a member of the board of trustees, who wants to donate a grandiose sports complex. Rumors of campus improprieties swirl alongside political machinations of the pro- and anti-change camps. Education, politics, money, class, and scandal mix for an exciting read.

Gaines, Ernest
A Lesson Before Dying
The story of two African American men struggling to attain manhood in a prejudiced society, this tale is set in Louisiana in the late 1940s. It concerns Jefferson, a mentally slow young man, who, though an innocent bystander to a shootout between a white store owner and two black robbers, is convicted of murder, and the sophisticated, educated man who comes to his aid.

Follett, Ken
World Without End
Follett has finally published a sequel to Pillars of the Earth, eighteen years later. The town of Kingsbridge in 14 th century England is the setting. The gothic cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroad of new ideas—about medicine.

Geraldine Brooks
March
Mr. March, the absent father from Little Women, is an idealistic Concord cleric, who becomes a Union chaplain and later finds himself assigned to be a teacher on a cotton plantation that employs freed slaves. His narrative begins with cheerful letters home, but March gradually reveals to the reader what he does not to his family: the cruelty and racism of the soldiers, the violence and suffering, and his reunion with Grace, a beautiful, educated slave whom he met years earlier.