Archives: Books
Archives: Books
Where the Red Fern Grows
Where the Red Fern Grows is a beloved classic that captures the powerful bond between man and man’s best friend. This edition also includes a special note to readers from Newbery Medal winner and Printz Honor winner Clare Vanderpool. Billy has long dreamt of owning not one, but two, dogs. So when he’s finally able to save up enough money for two pups to call his own—Old Dan and Little Ann—he’s ecstatic. It doesn’t matter that times are tough; together they’ll roam the hills of the Ozarks. Soon Billy and his hounds become the finest hunting team in the valley. Stories of …
The Wheel of Time (Series)
The Wheel of Time is a series of fantasy novels set in an unnamed imaginary world. The plot takes place about 3,000 years after a cataclysm that ended the Age of Legends – a time of great enlightenment. It covers the battle between The Creator, who built the cosmos, and the Dark One, his archenemy, through a group of young people with extraordinary abilities. The titular wheel refers to the cyclical nature of time, with the opening lines of the first novel noting that “There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time.” The series draws …
War and Peace
War and Peace (1869) is one of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpieces of literary realism, detailing how Tsarist Russia must face the rise of the French emperor Napoléon, and how both halves of the title can complicate romantic love. The lives of five aristocratic Russian families intertwines French invasion looms and society in St. Petersburg struggles to continue despite the threat. Combining real wartime events, multiple love triangles, and themes of existentialism and betrayal, Tolstoy’s epic novel speaks to the endurance of these families and their continuation of the Russian lifestyle under siege.
The Twilight Saga (Series)
One of the most popular young adult fiction series of all time, selling over 100 million books in 37 languages, Twilight charts the romance between Bella Swan, a small town girl and social outcast, and Edward Cullen, a 104-year-old vampire with a gift for reading minds. The quartet of novels – Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn – explore forbidden love, adversity, choice, morality, judgement and isolation, and developed an unprecedented fan following worldwide. This is the first book of the series.
To Kill a Mockingbird
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of …
This Present Darkness
This Present Darkness is a Christian thriller, depicting a battle for the souls of humanity between angels and demons. It begins in the small town of Ashton, where a newspaper editor is investigating why one of his reporters has been arrested. The chief of police insists it was a mistake, but after further investigation the editor discovers a New Age plot to take over the town and is arrested. In prison he meets a born-again pastor, who has also noticed strange things happening in the town and has been arrested for asking too many questions. Together, the pair come up with …
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one …
Their Eyes Were Watching God
One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
Tales of the City (Series)
The first of seven novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a wry comedy of manners and a deeply involving portrait of a vanished era.
The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises is a classic example of Ernest Hemingway’s spare but powerful writing style in his depiction of the Lost Generation. A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates in an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.
The Stand
When a man escapes from a biological testing facility, he sets in motion a deadly domino effect, spreading a mutated strain of the flu that will wipe out 99 percent of humanity within a few weeks. The survivors who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge–Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious “Dark Man” who delights in chaos and violence.
The Sirens of Titan
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there’s a catch to the invitation–and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.
Siddhartha
In the novel Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life–the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom.
The Shack
Mackenzie Allen Phillips’s youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation. Evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later, in the midst of his great sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note–apparently from God–inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment, he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change his life forever.
Rebecca
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten—a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the …
Ready Player One
The worldwide bestseller—now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade’s devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world’s digital confines—puzzles that are based on their creator’s obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them. But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this …
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen’s most beloved novel, follows the clever and kind but “obstinate, headstrong” young woman Elizabeth Bennet and her four sisters as they navigate the intricacies of English society in the Regency period. Resistant to her mother’s avowal that she must marry “a single man in possession of a good fortune” (lest the family’s meager property be entailed to an unpleasant cousin), Elizabeth meets the wealthy but aloof Mr. Darcy at a country ball, where her sister Jane and his rich friend Bingley form an attachment despite their class differences. With one bachelor enchanted and the other …
The Pillars of the Earth
“Follett is a master,” extolled the Washington Post on the release of The Pillars of the Earth. A departure for the bestselling thriller writer, the historical epic stunned readers and critics alike with its ambitious scope and gripping humanity. Today, it stands as a testament to Follett’s unassailable command of the written word and to his universal appeal.The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known … of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect—a man divided in his soul … of the beautiful, …
The Pilgrim’s Progress
The Pilgrim’s Progress is John Bunyan’s allegory for Puritan morals and teachings, set in contrast to the growing Anglicanism of his day. It follows the pilgrimage of a man named Christian (and later his wife Christiana) who has been called to the Celestial City, or heaven, and meets several characters along the way (like Evangelist, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Goodwill, and Beelzebub) that either help or hinder him. Christian’s steadfastness when confronted with obstacles is meant to convey the pure soul of a Puritan. With its plain style, anthropomorphized virtues and vices, and simple narrative structure,it was immensely popular in its day …
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in two versions, in 1890 and 1891) is Oscar Wilde’s Gothic novel about the price of vanity and selfishness. At the beginning of the novel, a young artist named Basil has just finished his masterpiece: a portrait of his young and beautiful friend Dorian Gray. After wishing that he could remain attractively youthful while the painting ages in his stead, Dorian finds that this wish has come true: he remains free to live a hedonistic and venal lifestyle while only the painting bears the marks of his cruelty and age. Twenty years later, Dorian’s crimes …