Oates revisits the JonBenet Ramsay murder, replacing the famous family with the Rampikes, and sone Skyler is the narrator of this tale of ambition, greed, and tragedy.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

This is a novel of strong Southern women,  one of which includes a cancer survivor who finds her husband in bed with anouther woman.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Inspired by the umpublished diary of a Prussian woman who fled west in 1945, this story follows German refugees struggling westward ahead of the advancing Russian army.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

A multigenerational story of sin, redemption, murder, and vengeance.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

This elegant collection contains ten new stories and twenty-one stories from Wolff's three previous collections.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

This is a stunning collection of eight stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lahiri.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

A condemned inmate desires to be an organ donor.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

A random shooting becomes less so when cops investigate on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

A woman falls in love with her sister's love interest.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

When The Queen takes a ride on a library bookmobile, she develops into a dedicated reader of serious literature, and her government is dumbfounded by this new royal practice--as well as by her newfound knowledge about everything.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Chabon writes of a fabled kingdom on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, in this whimsical historical adventure.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Lloyd Jones, a New Zealand author with a dozen books to his credit, has written a coming of age novel with a much wider impact than its tropical island setting would suggest.  Matilda is a thirteen-year-old girl being raised by her mother in a poor seaside settlement constantly threatened by war.  Violence is endemic, playing out on a skin color spectrum, from black to red to white.  People who could leave have mainly left, including the local teacher.  Mr. Watts, a decidedly unusual white man, takes over the teaching duties, and as the centerpiece of his curriculum, reads to the children daily from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.  The alien London setting captured the children's imaginations, and Mister Pip came alive for them.  The time was right, Matilda and her friends were delighted to find "a world that was whole and made sense, unlike ours."  Matilda's mother was less enthusiastic about a project "that won't hook a fish or peel a banana."  And indeed, the book could not head off the tragedies that people inflicted on one another.  What it was able to supply was an unexpected sense of possibility, a belief that an individual could rise above his setting, and that home was real.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

"At a cafe table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting." "Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite "valuation" firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his infatuation with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore." "But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez's own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love."--BOOK JACKET.

Winner of the 2007 Mann Booker Award for Fiction

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Patchett weaves several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative about what makes a family.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

A depressed divorcée kills her elderly mother and spends the next 24 hours reliving her terrible childhood.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.