The middle volume of Faulks' "French Trilogy" (with The Girl at the Lion d'or and Charlotte Gray), this title deals with a complicated love affair between a young British man and a married French woman, in the World War I era.  The novel moves in time between 1910 and 1979, but the most powerful sections deal with the bleak and brutal European trench warfare.

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In these twelve short stories, Trevor reveals the darker aspects of life, and the uncomfortable truths of disillusioned relationships.

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Toni Morrison gained international recognition for her literary career when she won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature.  This title was her first novel, and it already shows what Morrison could do.  The book features Pecola, a young black Ohio girl caught between unattainable goals and unsavory realities.

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The author has created The City, a sort of Limbo in which the dead remain comfortably alive until the time when no one on earth remembers them.  The predictable cycling of The City's population is drastically altered when a deadly virus kills off the world's population (except for a single scientist stranded in Antarctica).

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A bestselling debut novel for this author, it features eccentric and endearing characters who learn that everything that's broken (porcelain, hearts, lives...) can be renewed.

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Nathan Glass has come to brooklen to die, but his world broadens when he finds himself drawn into a scam involving a forged page of The Scarlett Letter.  This is Paul Auster's warmest and most moving novel about the mysteries of ordinary human life.

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Combining southern warmth and side-splitting hilarity, Fannie Flagg takes us to Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where the surprising experiences of a high-energy octogenarian inspire a town to ponder the question:  Why are we here?

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In the mid-1940s, Sgt. Louis Belk goes on a mission to detonate Japanese hot air balloons that have been armed with explosives and deployed over America.  The slightest rumor of the balloons' existence might have a terrible effect on American morale, which makes the job of Belk's bomb disposal unit even more critical.

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This is Mitchell's third novel, and it has proven to be one of the most honored novels of recent years.  Structurally, it spans hundreds of years with six narratives that range from period historical to science fiction.  All the stories (except one) break abruptly and are resumed later in a careful sequence.  The surprise is that the very strong and artificial pattern works, enhancing rather than overwhelming the dissimilar parts.

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Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983) and the National Book Award, this title is one of the classic works of contemporary African-American fiction.  Focused on women of color who are victimes of often violent abuse, this is not an easy book, but one that is important.

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Winner of several Canadian literary awards, this was on the Canadian bestseller lists for more than a year.  It's a girl's coming-of-age novel whose limits and constrictions are found in a Mennonite community on the plains of Manitoba.  Toews makes this unlikely setting seem both relevant and familiar.

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The bastard son of a bishop continues to help Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine find out if her son Richard Lionheart is still alive in a German prison.  Penman makes the daily life of 1193 England very accessible in this lively novel.

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A slender, compelling book, Haddon's novel won several major British literary prizes when it first appeared.  The book is presentee from the perspective of Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old autistic boy.  The book provides not so much an answer to the whodunit as a poignant insight into the workings of a very different mind.  Christopher is memorable both for his unflinching directness and his unremitting vulnerability.

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A delightfully dishy novel about the most impossible boss in the history of bosses.

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Set in a gorgeous but demanding West Australia, this book tells the story of bored, 40'ish Georgie Jutland; Jim, her fisherman lover; and Luther Fox, the poacher she falls for.  While the feeling is that everything ought to be simple, nothing is, not even the dirt music of the title:  "anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity."  Shortlisted for the Booker prize.

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Wells, an actress turned writer, has produced a dramatic tour de force.  Rooted in a South that is inescapably stifling, the novel traces the lives of the women who as girls bonded as the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.  Childhood, marriage, parenthood, love, and obligation-everything is examined.  "Life is not a book,"  says one of the women; "you can't just...walk away from it when it gets boring."

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A Siberian-born Russian expatriate brought up by a French-speaking grandmother, Makine writes a coming-of-age novel of a young Russian boy who winds up accepting political asylum in France.  The sensitive story linking a semi-mythical France and a communist Russia won both of France's major literary awards when it was first published.

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These 27 essays celebrate the oddness of his family.

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This book was the winner of the 2006 National Book Award for fiction, as well as a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize.  Powers is an aggressively knowledgeable and intelligent author who has put together a mesmerizing mix of everything from brain trauma and memory to the instinctive mass migrations of the sandhill cranes.  He has written a subversive novel in which he presents what should be a simple picture, but which turns out to reveal the "improvised, mess, crack-strewn, gaping thing underneath" the surface reality.

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Foer followed up his bestselling debut novel (Everything Is Illuminated) with this early look at the implications of 9/11.  The narrator is a 9-year-old boy whose father died in the terrorist attack.  The book chronicles his quixotic attempts at getting a handle on a world that's gone bad.

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The true story of one spirited Japanese-American family's attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention . . . and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States.

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This profound novel portrays two lovers struggling against political violence in Haiti in 1937.

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Roberts introduces a variety of women, mostly wives, sisters, or mothers of key politicians, exploring how they used their wit, wealth, or connections to influence the men in their lives.

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William Gaddis may be the best author that no one has ever heard of.  He won the National Book Award for fiction not once, but twice, including for this book.  This is a substantial black comic look at law and art and artists and their uncomfortable intersections.  The book is off and running with its first sentence:  "Justice?-You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law."

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Morgan was an academic writer best known for his poetry, when his period novel, Gap Creek, was made an early choice of Oprah's Book Club.  His story of a strong young woman grappling with trial and tragedy in late 19th century Appalachia reached a much broader audience than he was used to, and the new readers were enthusiastic.  Julie Harmon joined the small but memorable group of indomitable mountain women who somehow manage to survive despite long odds.

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In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. In this luminous novel, Sarah Addison Allen tells the story of that enchanted tree, and the extraordinary people who tend it.…

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This is one of those books that sound ridiculous when summarized, but are mesmerizing when they are read.  Peggy Cort is a young Cape Cod librarian.  James Sweatt is a local 11-year-old who is already tall, and well on the way to beciming a genuine giant.  The two become unlikely but perhaps inevitable partners, and the book provides a wealth of sharp observation and insight.  McCracken is one of the legion of successful graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and this title was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award.

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An ailing preacher leaves an account of his life for his son who will never really know him.

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Equal parts family saga, forbidden love story, and political drama, this is the story of an affluent Indian family forever changed by one fateful day in 1969.

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Steinbeck wrote a populist fiction that focused on working men and women more than on the movers and shakers.  He did well enough with that approach that he won both a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize.  This book chronicled the odyssey of the displaced Joad family, Okies fleeing the dust bowl and the Great Depression, looking for a better life in California.  They sought the 'pastures of plenty' (another Steinbeck title) and found, instead, an apocalyptic world in which just staying alive was a challenge.  Many thought the portrait too harsh, but it remains both powerful and popular.

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This brilliant work explains why people of certain continents have succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples.

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Dalton is a local author (on the faculty at UMSL), but his novel is set on the other side of the world.  Vincent Saunders is a young St. Louis area missionary working in Taiwan, supplementing his income by teaching the English language.  Discredited and disgraced by a sexual episode with a student, Saunders finds himself taking on a melodramatic marital mission to far western China.  The book is a fascinating exploration of the never-simple interface of east and west.  Winner of the 2004 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.

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Krauss puts together a haunting story of love and loss, seen through the lens of the post-WWII Jewish diaspora.  It is a legitimate 'history of love,' incorporating coincidence and fantasy and all those essential extras with which we embellish the primary experience.  Krauss is married to the best-selling author Jonathan Safron Foer, who often works the same vein of Jewish-American experience.

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This Pulitzer Prize winning book is a fictionalized look at the British author Virginia Woolf.  Cunningham carefully reworks Woolf's

rs. Dalloway to give a contemporary impact to an old story.  Thought-provoking and beautifully written:  "How much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death."  Although, with Woolf, maybe not.

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Dubus has good bloodlines for writing fiction; his father was a master of the short story, while his cousin, James Lee Burke, is a very successful mystery writer.  This title features displaced Persians in the U.S., whose attempts to become assimilated rapidly turn tragic.  The book was an Oprah Book Club selection and a National Book Award finalist.

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In 1959, Herbert Clutter, with his wife and two children, was murdered on his Kansas farm.  It was the quintessential "senseless" murder, accomplishing little for the two parolees who were convicted of the crime.  When Capote wrote his account of the killings, he produced a brand-new kind of book, an in-depth account of "true crime" that works as a non-fiction novel.  Years of association with the jailed killers gave Capote remarkable insight, and true crime writing has never been the same since.

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This bittersweet romance is set against the backdrop of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood-a tragedy that cost 2,200 lives when the South Fork Dam burst on Memorial Day weekend, 1889.

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Alverez has made a novel out of the true life drama of the lives of the Mirabal sisters in the Dominican Republic.  U.S. citizens will have a tough time understanding the claustrophobia and paranoia and just plain fear of the years of the Trujillo dictatorship.  The Mirabal sisters role in the anti-Trujillo rebellion gives new meaning to the concepts of bravery and tragedy.

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Set in 17th century reformation England, the novel focuses on the poisoning death of Oxford don Robert Grove.  Four characters each provide their own detailed observations and conclusions about what was happening.  The book is not only a riveting example of the mystery genre, but a highly accessible novel of ideas, dealing with the nature of truth and how we find it.  A caveat for discussions groups is that this is avery long book, and requires a substantial investment of time.

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This is the true story of a 24-hour period on Everest, when members of three separate expeditions were caught in a storm and had to battle against hurricane-force winds and the effects of altitude, which ended the worst single-season death toll in the peak's history.

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Goodman is an academic (literature) with strong family connections to the sciences.  This title takes a look at normal-seeming people who respond poorly to the pressures of trying to arrange medical research that is both recognized and funded.  The plot has more than once seen itself played out in real life.

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A first novel, this title occupies a compelling but undefined territory somewhere between fantasy and historical fiction.  It depicts a 19th century England in which magic is known, used, and respected.  The novel won the 2005 Hugo Award (science fiction).  It is an unusually long novel.

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In 1949, four Chinese women begin meeting in San Francisco for fun. Nearly 40 years later, their daughters continue to meet as the Joy Luck Club. Their stories ultimately display the double happiness that can be found in being both Chinese and American.

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The novel is a tour de force of magical realism, set in an unfamiliar Japan that serves as a backdrop to a kind of modern-day Greek tragedy, complete with Oedipal themes.  Murakami has been very successful in bringing the insights of western culture to bear on the traditional Japanese experience.  The New York Times named this one of the ten best books of 2005.

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The Killer Angels is a dramatic re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg.

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When this book came out, it immediately became the runaway favorite of the nation's book groups.  Combining exotic location and culture with the headlines of contemporary news, this book takes its tale of courage and betrayal from Afghanistan to the U.S. and back again.  A compelling novel that speaks of humanity, as opposed to nationality.

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This is the astonishing true story of Ruth Harkness, the Manhattan socialite who trekked to Tibet in 1936 to capture the most mysterious animal of the day.

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A man with Alzheimer's disease compiles a book of poems for his favorite granddaughter, Emily, hoping that his words of hard-won wisdom will heal the old wounds that are tearing his family apart.

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In this darkly comic memoir, Mary Karr, a prize-winning poet and critic, recalls her upbringing in a swampy East Texas refinery town.

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Pi is Piscine Molitor Patel, a boy from India, who is shipwrecked while his zookeeper father is trying to relocate his family to Canada.  Pi winds up sharing a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutang, and a tiger; predictably, they do not all survive.  The fantastic allegorical adventure provides plenty of opportunity to meditate on religion, tolerance, and the workings of fate.  Winner of the 2001 Booker Prize.

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An enduringly important fantasy adventure novel that has saped some of our strongest myths of utopia.  An oddly assorted group of western plane passengers crash in a secluded Tibetan valley, and are directed to the monastery of Shangri-La, a haven of peace and understanding where even aging has been defeated.  Hilton wrote his novel as the world rapidly approached another world war; his hidden island of sanity in an insane world has appealed to readers ever since.

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Inspector Chen of the Shanghai police tries to figure out the fate of a missing woman, a former Red Guard member who may be in trouble with her husband's criminal colleagues.  The author teaches at Washington University.

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From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story abouth his experiences fighting for the Union in the Civil War.  Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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A biography of Twain that tells of the wild and exciting 19th century life that inspired and motivated his writings.

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In 1964, a Kentucky doctor delivers his wife's babies.  She is bearing unsuspected twins, and one of them bears the unmistakable signs of Down's snydrome.  The doctor thinks he will spare his wife the sorrow of a child who he thinks will not live long anyhow, and arranges to send the baby to an institution, while telling his wife that the baby died.  This well-intentioned lie has endless ramifications, few of them much good.  A perennial favorite of discussion groups.

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A former Knight Templar and a castle bailiff join forces to find a murderer in the village of Wefford.

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Trillin is best known as a humorous essayist, with the combination of appetite and taste that makes him a superb food writer.  The heartland values that he brings to the table also inform this affectionate memoir of his father, a Kansas City shopkepper.  He credits his father with instilling a real sense of balance and proportion, a "strong sense of enoughness." 

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Spanning across eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence--this novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

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Never having canoed before, and with the loan of a friend's boat, Eddy L. Harris sets out to row the length of the Mississippi River--alone. Beautifully captured is the river's culture, the character of its people, as well as a man's remarkable spirit.

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Frank Hayden is a doctor in a small Montana town, and he is the uncle of David Hayden, the novel's young narrator.  The closer one looks, the more it becomes likely that Frank's 'treatment' of native Americna women could more properly be described as criminal abuse.  David's father and Frank's brother is the local sheriff, and the battle of lyalties - family vs. law- is joined.  The book won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize.

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Lethem is typically reluctant to limit himself to a single genre, with the result that critics are not quite sure how to classify his books.  This one is somewhere between a mystery and a regular novel.  The main character is a Brooklyn orphan (hence 'Motherless') who has Tourette syndrome, which affords Lethem more than ample scope for eye-catching tics and pyrotechnic language.  Winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award.

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This powerful and inspiring book shows how one person can make a difference, as Kidder tells the true story of a gifted doctor who is in love with the world and has set out to do all he can to cure it.

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Lahiri's tale of a family from India moving to Amer describes the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations.

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The No.1 Ladies´ Detective Agency, located in Gaborone, Botswana, consists of one woman, the engaging Precious Ramotswe. A cross between Kinsey Millhone and Miss Marple, this unlikely heroine specializes in missing husbands, wayward daughters, con men, and imposters.

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Set on both sides of the Atlantic, On Beauty is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's deceptions.

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The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America.

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New Yorker writer Susan Orlean follows John Laroche, an orchid thief, through the swamps and into the eccentric world of Florida's most obsessed plant collectors, a subculture of aristocrats, enthusiasts, and smugglers whose passion for plants is all-consuming. This book was the inspiration for the movie Adaptation.

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Effctually, if not technically, a debut novel, Peace Like a River became a surprise bestseller.  Using his own life as a catalyst for creativity, Enger wrote the book for his family's entertainment, solicited family input for plot development, and included powerful sections dealing with his child-protagonist's asthma (his real-life sone suffers from it).  Likable characters, compelling issues, and an engaging plot combine to make this a reasonable choice as the Independent Booksellers' Association 2002 Book of the Year.

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In science fiction circles, this book made quite a splash.  It won a few major sci-fi awards, and was nominated for the rest.  It posited a world (New Crobuzon) that appears to be like our Victorian-era Earth, but with pervasive alien differences.  Mieville consciously passed up the standard sword-and-sorcery mock feudal setting, creating what he calls "an early industrial capitalist world of a fairly grubby, poice statey kind."  Ideas and uninhibited adventure get equal play.

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Plainsong is a simple, unadorned liturgical music style, and it has a strong relevance to this Colorado novel.  The characters are plain and blunt, but there is an inspirational beauty in their action.  The book is glued together by Feisty Maggie, who engineers the foundation of the plot:  a pregnant schoolgirl, booted from her own home, is then sent to live with a crusty pair of bachelor brothers.  A finalist for the National Book Award.

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Kingsolver has a dual perspective on writing:  "First, a novel has to entertain," she says, but then it should also do good.  This title does well in both areas.  It deals with a Georgia Baptist missionary who takes his wife and four daughters to the Congo, where he struggles with a quixotic attempt to spread the word and kingdom of God.  Georgia and the Congo are two very different worlds, and that becomes more and more ovbious.  Not everyone survives the confrontation.  An early selection of Oprah's Book Club.

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Cross has constructed a fascinating historical novel around a story that has intrigued and annoyed church historian for centruies.  A brilliant English girl-in a world that has no place for brilliant women-presents herself as a male cleric John Anglicus.  Her talents, not easily hidden, eventually led to here election as a 9th century pope.  A compelling and controversial story, no matter what you finally decide is the actual proportion of fact to fiction.

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One of Irving's most respected novels, the book tells the story of John Wheelright and his best friend Owen Meany, growing up in small town New England.  Owen feels that he is one of the means by which God gains his ends, and he plays an unexpected and uncanny role in much of John's life.  Irving is a master storyteller and thinker, and the book does very well on both counts.

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Jacob Hansen is a Civil War veteran who has returned, relatively intact, from the horrors of the fighting.  Working as the sheriff, minister, and undertaker in the small town of Friendship, Wisconsin; married, and with a young daughter, Jacob's life appears to be on the mend.  Mix in one tramp carrying diphtheria and a wind-borne forest fire and soon there is nothing left but questions about God and fate and justice that no one is going to be able to answer.

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A young woman caught in the rivalry between Queen Mary and her half sister, Elizabeth, must find her true destiny amid treason, poisonous rivalries, loss of faith, and unrequited love.

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Diamant (A Washington U. Graduate) has put together a book that people love to talk about.  She has taken the character Dinah from the Old Testament, and expanded the few lines she is allotted into an entire book.  The 'red tent' is where the biblical women were sequestered when they were menstruating or giving birth.  Diamant provides a fascinating look at the women of the Bible, a look that doesn't get much attention in the original.

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Baxter is a writer's writer who has honed his craft on the short story and occasional poetry.  He is sort of corrective to the literary coastal bias-a chronicler of the upper Midwest.  Saul and Patsy is set in Michigan, where Saul has taken a teaching job.  Geographically a good distance out of the mainstream, smalll town Michigan still offers up examples of prejudice, intolerance, and violence.  A useful perspective.

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A big satisfying book that can't be confined to a single genre; it has elements of romance, thriller, gothic, mystery, and period novel.  The author projects it as one of a multi-volume work based in Barcelona, Spain.  (A prequel, The Angel's Game, became available in 2009.)  Among other things, this is a love letter to books, and will immediately appeal to hard-core readers by introducing the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books.  A true international bestseller.

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A young woman's life is shattered when her younger brother vanishes at the age of seventeen, fleeing their father's rigid rules of masculinity and the violence their mother denies.

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"I was twenty-nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday 4 November 1966. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to save whatever could be saved, including myself." The Italians called them "Mud Angels," the young foreigners who came to Florence in 1966 to save the city's treasured art from the Arno's flooded banks. #160; #160;American volunteer Margot Harrington was one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library of a Carmelite convent. #160; #160;For within its walls she discovered a priceless Renaissance masterwork: a sensuous volume of sixteen erotic poems and drawings. Inspired to sample each of the ineffable sixteen pleasures, Margot embarks on the intrigue of a lifetime with a forbidden lover and the contraband volume--a sensual, life-altering journey of loss and rebirth in this exquisite novel of spiritual longing and earthly desire.

Turkey has long been the battleground where Asian tradition has been confronted with European innovation.  Pamuk gives us the story of Ka, an expatriate poet who returns to Turkey and becomes involved in the complex and ambiguous interactions between Turkey's government and the fundamentalist Islam that presents itself as Turkey's established religion.  The conflicts are individual and specific, but also generic and universal.  That Pamuk's vision applied to the whole world was formally recognized by his selection as the winner of 2006's Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Mary Beth becomes the hero of her small Missouri town when she "reads" people's secrets and desires from the songs they can't get out of their minds.

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Its title is a zen koan that underscores the difficulty in making real sense of what we experience.  Flanagan writes of blue-collar Slovenian immigrants in Tasmania, down off the southern coast of Australia.  The troubles that brought them to a new land do not disappear, and their lives in Tasmania are bedeviled with pain and alcohol and abuse.  Winner of several major Australian literary awards.

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The year is 2019 and the radio observatory of Arecibo picks up signs of intelligent life out among the stars.  The Jesuits put together a mission to contact and investigate the new-found aliens.  It's a plot that was easy to dismiss as, according to the author, "Jesuits in space," but it turned into a hard-hitting novel of ideas that addressed universal issues like good and evil and ultimate responsibility.  An award-winning book whose popularity does not seem to diminish.

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The author, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, had an eventful but unreliable upbringing, to the extent that the neighborhood bar took on, for him, some of the parental roles.  "The bar saved me," he tells us, and the cast of characters found there is often endearing and always unforgettable.  (A bonus, locally, is that an important companion of Moehringer's youth was McGraw Milhaven, who can be heard now on St. Louis radio.)

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Fourteen-eary-old Trixie Stone has her life turned upside-down by a single act of violence.  Her father becomes enraged and takes matters into his own hands.

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Initially published in 1937, this is the story of a proud, independent black woman's quest for identity, a journey that takes her through three marriages and back to her roots.

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In this peculiar story, three small-town girls discover a man's corpse at the edge of a lake, and one of them mysteriously brings him back to life.

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Set in 14th-century Albania, this novel chronicles the events surrounding the construction of a bridge.  The book is presented as the account of a monk who is privy to negotiations about the Ottomans.

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A former lawyer escapes to small-town Texas to operate an herb shop and enjoy the simple life, but murder interrupts her simple life when a local protest organizer dies suddenly.

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A love story that would be engaging enough on its own is complicated by Henry DeTamble's unplanned and undirected time travel, a consequence of a genetic disorder.  He blinks in and out of time and place, first meeting his wife, Clare, when she is six, then marrying her when she has become a young woman.  Making the best (and a very satisfactory best it is) of a life that is basically unpredictable and uncontrollable makes for a fascinating book.  Niffennegger is a Chicago area artist with recognizable similarities to her character, Clare.

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This book is changing the way we think about selling products and disseminating ideas.  Gladwell describes the personality types that create trends (like a plethora of people who suddenly start wearing Hush Puppy shoes) and those that influence others by "spreading the word."

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Two women meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York.  Over twenty years, their friendship encompasses narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality.

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A dedicated doctor is torn by his love for two women:  one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Edgerton seems to have taken out the franchise on warm-hearted small town Southern novels.  This title features 78-year-old Mattie Rigsbee, whose repeated perception- "I'm slowin' down"-is at odds with what everyone else is seeing.  Stray dogs, juvenile delinquents, and the local church scene are all stirred together in an offbeat, but very satisfying story.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Woodrell is one of the literary elite, author of 8 novels, a graduate of the University of Iowa's renowned writing program.  He is also a native of backwoods Missouri, and that is what he regularly writes about.  It is a dangerous, violent setting, in which cooking meth is a common livelihood and the bloody ramifications of the southern 'culture of honor' are everywhere in evidence.  Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly has a deadly challenge just trying to survive; there are few to help her.  It's a bleak world: "dull to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean."

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Emily Maxwell gathers her family together at their summer home in western New York for a final sendoff and to pass out keepsakes before the new owners move in.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

A former publishing prodigy is stalled in the midst of his endless second book, while his Hollywood-obsessed student struggles with his own searching heart.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.

Is it possible to approach "God" not as an object of religious reverence, but as the protagonist of the world's greatest book?  A former Jesuit illuminates "God" (and man) with a sense of discovery and wonder.

Annotation by: St. Louis Public Library staff.