Anderson, M.T.
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation- Volume One: The Pox Party
It sounds like a fairy tale. He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the finest of classical educations. Raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother are the only persons in their household assigned names. When young Octavian begins to question the purpose behind his guardians' fanatical studies, he dares to open a forbidden door and learn the hideous nature of their experiments and his own chilling role in them.

Némirovsky, Irene
Fire in the Blood
From the author of Suite Francaise, Fire in the Blood is narrated by middle-aged Silvio during the pre-WWII days in rural France. He recounts the three interlocking stories of love and betrayal that play out over two decades in Burgundy. These secret affairs, he says, can be explained only by fire in the blood, the intense passion that can overtake men and women when they are young vulnerable.

Jones, Edward
The Known World
On a small plantation in Manchester County, Virginia in the eighteen-fifties, a freed black man named Henry Townsend lives with his thirty-three slaves. When he dies, things begin to fall apart. Beyond the Townsend estate, low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.

Tannen, Deborah
You’re Wearing That?: Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.
Why do daughters complain that their mothers always criticize, while mothers feel hurt that their daughters shut them out? Deborah Tannen examines every aspect of this complex dynamic, from the dark side that can shadow a woman throughout her life, to the new technologies like e-mail and instant messaging that are transforming mother-daughter communication.

Brooks , Geraldine
People of the Book: A Novel
Late one night in Sydney, Hanna Heath, a rare book conservator, gets a phone call. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which disappeared during the siege in 1992, has been found, and Hanna has been invited by the U.N. to report on its condition. Who created this beautifully illustrated codex and through whose hands has it survived? Hanna follows clues—a white hair, an insect wing, missing clasps, a drop of salt, a wine stain—to unravel the mystery.

Allende, Isabel
Inés of My Soul
In the 16th century, Doña Inés Suárez, a poor seamstress, trails her deadbeat husband across the Atlantic to Peru. After husband's death, she remains in the New World, becoming the paramour and partner of Pedro de Valdivia, a war hero who serves legendary explorer Francisco Pizarro. Pedro dreams of honor and glory. To achieve it, he and Inés wage a war against the indigenous Chileans, a ruthless struggle that will change both of them forever.

Bloom, Amy
Away
Lillian Leyb, a 22-year-old Jewish immigrant, arrived in New York after her family was decimated in a Russian pogrom. Mourning her toddler daughter and barely speaking English, she finds work as a seamstress. After hearing that her daughter has been seen alive, a hopeful and determined Lillian sets off to find her. The journey takes Lillian through Chicago by train, into Seattle's African-American underworld, and across the Alaskan wilderness.

Ondaatje, Michael
Divisadero
In the 1970s in Northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives. A multilayered novel about passion, loss, family, and an unshakable past.

Hosseini, Khaled
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The second novel by the author of The Kite Runner follows two Afghani women through three decades of invasion, war, jihad, and the Taliban. Mariam was forced at age 15 into marrying the 40-year-old Rasheed. Eighteen years later and childless, Rasheed takes another wife, 14-year-old Laila. The book provides a peek into modern Afghan society with a mix of hope, heroism, love, justice, and sacrifice.

Penney, Stef
The Tenderness of Wolves
1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, an isolated settlement in Canada’s Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. A local woman stumbles upon the crime scene and sees tracks leading from the dead man’s cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. A variety of outsiders are drawn to the crime and to the township—but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it? One by one, searchers set out to follow the tracks across a desolate landscape, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture all before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.

Grisham, John
The Appeal
Is the justice system as corrupt as the political system? In a crowded courtroom, a jury returns a shocking verdict against a chemical company accused of dumping toxic waste into a small town’s water supply, causing the worst “cancer cluster” in history. The company appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court, whose nine justices will one day either approve the verdict or reverse it. Can one justice be replaced before the case is ultimately decided?

Kiran Desai
The Inheritance of Loss
In a crumbling house at the edge of the Himalayas live an embittered retired judge and his orphaned granddaughter Sai. The judge's chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son who lives in America. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai's new romance with her handsome Nepali tutor, the characters are forced to confront their colliding interests. A Booker Prize winner!