Reader's Link - Book Kits (Fiction)

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1984
by George Orwell
A chilling portrait of a totalitarian society under the ever-watchful gaze of Big Brother, where love, privacy, and individuality are banned.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Accidental Tourist
by Anne Tyler
The meeting of Macon Leary, a travel-hater who makes his living writing travel guides called "The Accidental Tourist In...," and frizzy-haired, non-stop talker Muriel sets off an unexpected chain of events.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Ahab's Wife
by Sena Jeter Naslund
Seeking adventure, Una Spenser runs away, masquerades as a boy, and joins a whaling ship which begins a life for her of adventure and trials which enables Una to grow into a strong and intelligent woman.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho
An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago travels from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of treasure buried in the pyramids. Along the way he meets a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself king, and an alchemist, all of whom point Santiago in the direction of his quest. What starts out as a journey to find worldly goods turns into a meditation on the treasures found within.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood
Based on a sensational trial that made headlines throughout the world, a nineteenth-century housemaid endures life imprisonment for the murders of her employer and mistress, murders she may not have committed, while a doctor tries to help her recover her memories of the past.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
John Grady Cole, 16, leaves Texas for Mexico in 1950 and becomes an essential vaquero in a hacienda's program.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Amateur Marriage
by Anne Tyler
Marrying quickly during World War II after falling in love at first sight, a mismatched couple discovers that their very different personalities and approaches to life are taking a toll on their lives, their relationship, and their family.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
In 1939 New York City, Joe Kavalier, a refugee from Hitler's Prague, joins forces with his Brooklyn-born cousin, Sammy Clay, to create comic-book superheroes inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Amy and Isabelle
by Elizabeth Strout
When Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student, falls in love with her math teacher, the love affair threatens the intimate relationship between Amy and her mother, Isabelle, whose feelings are influenced by the shame of her own past.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner
Wheelchair-bound historian Lyman Ward decides to write about the frontier lives of his grandparents at a time when he has lost connection with his living family.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons
by Lorna Landvik
From the initial formation of The Freesia Court Book Club and over the course of the next thirty years, five women in small-town Minnesota share the events, triumphs, tragedies, hardships, joys, and sorrows of their lives, in a heartwarming story of friendship.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Anil's Ghost
by Michael Ondaatje
In the bloody sectarian upheaval that ripped Sri Lanka apart in the 1980s and '90s, the enemy is difficult to identify. The protagonist, Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan, left her homeland at 18 and returns to it 15 years later only as part of an international human rights fact-finding mission.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
This classic novel tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
Chronicles the lives of two boys--one who is forgotten by history, and one who becomes the creator of the world's most famous detective--as they pursue their separate destinies until they meet in a remarkable alliance.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Atonement
by Ian McEwan
In a crumbling English mansion in 1935, young Briony tells a lie that sends a man to jail. Five years later, a solider retreats during World War II. These story threads come together in the book's surprising conclusion.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
The story of a married woman who pursues love outside a stuffy, middle-class marriage, The Awakening portrays the mind of a woman seeking fulfillment of her essential nature.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Babel Tower
by A.S. Byatt
While an independent young woman struggles with a personal crisis, her friends and family become caught up in the clashing politics, ideals, shifting sexual roles, and upheaval of the early 1960s
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Back When We Were Grownups
by Anne Tyler
In this deeply moving novel a woman of fifty-three tries to find out who she truly is, compared to who her world believes she is.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
by Dai Sijie
Two boys are sent to the countryside to be re-educated in this fable set during China's Cultural Revolution. They discover hope through forbidden western literature, but find hope can be cruel and corrupting.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Bean Trees
by Barbara Kingsolver
Taylor Greer hits the road wanting only to get as far away from Kentucky as possible, ending up in Arizona with a 3-year-old Cherokee girl she has inherited from a woman in a bar.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Bee Season
by Myla Goldberg
Nine-year-old Eliza Naumann is considered an unspectacular child -- until she surprises everyone by winning her school spelling bee. But just as Eliza begins to shine, her family starts falling apart.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Before You Know Kindness
by Chris Bohjalian
After a decade of spending a delightful summer week at their country house in New Hampshire, the members of the extended Seton family are confronted by a terrible accident, testing the values and relationships that hold them together.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Behind the Scenes at the Museum
by Kate Atkinson
A family saga chronicles a century of life as four generations of Yorkshire women move through two World Wars, coronations, secrets, heartbreak, and happiness, all seen through the eyes of an inimitable narrator named Ruby Lennox.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett
In the Vice President's house in an unnamed South American country, what begins as an elegant dinner party turns into a kidnapping that goes awry when the President the terrorists are intent on capturing misses the dinner. When the government refuses to give in to their demands, the hostage situation continues for a number of weeks during which a pleasant domesticity, enlivened by opera singing, begins to blur the lines between captive and captor.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

Big Stone Gap
by Adriana Trigiani
Town pharmacist and local spinster Ave Maria has been keeping the secrets of Big Stone Gap for a long time, but now a skeleton is about to tumble from her own family closet.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Birds In Fall
by Brad Kessler
When a plane crashes off the coast of Nova Scotia, Kevin Gearns witnesses the bonding among the survivors who stay in his inn, while Ana Gathreaux, who has lost her husband in the crash, remembers how they worked together to save birds.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Birth of Venus
by Sarah Dunant
Turning fifteen in Renaissance Florence, Alessandra Cecchi becomes intoxicated with the works of a young painter whom her father has brought to the city to decorate the family's Florentine palazzo.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Bless Me Ultima
by Rudolfo Anaya
Chronicles the story of an alienated New Mexico boy who seeks an answer to his questions about life in his relationship with Ultima, a magical healer.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Blessings
by Anna Quindlan
When a teenage couple abandons their baby at the gate of the estate owned by Lydia Blessing, Skip Cuddy, the estate caretaker, decides to raise the child himself, a decision that has a profound effect on the lives of everyone in the community, in a story of love, secrets, and redemption.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
Iris describes the 1945 death of her sister, who drives her car off a bridge, followed, two years later, by the death of her husband, in a story that features a novel-within-a-novel about two unnamed lovers who meet in a dark backstreet room.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Blue Shoe
by Anne Lamott
When she stumbles upon a small rubber blue shoe left behind in her deceased father's car, Mattie Ryder, a recently divorced mother of two young children struggles to uncover the truth about her dysfunctional upbringing. In the process, she finds the foundation for a new relationship with her mother and the potential for a new life.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Bonesetter's Daughter
by Amy Tan
When Ruth Young comes across a stack of letters in Chinese calligraphy written by her ailing mother, she discovers the truth about her mother's life as the daughter of the famous bonesetter in the village of Xian Xin, China.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Book Borrower
by Alice Mattison
A book about a trolley strike lent from one friend to the other plays an unexpected role in the long and difficult friendship of Toby Ruben and Deborah Laidlaw.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Breath, Eyes, Memory
by Edwidge Danticat
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished Haitian village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that can only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
Carrying into her adult years a sense of fatalism instilled during her hardscrabble birth, Nazneen finds herself married off to a man twice her age and moved to London, where she begins to wonder if she has a say in her own destiny.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Broken For You
by Stephanie Kallos
Two very different women, each with her own dark secrets--wealthy, reclusive septuagenarian Margaret Hughes, living alone with her vast collection of priceless antiques, and Wanda Schultz, a brokenhearted young woman in search of her wayward boyfriend--find new meaning and redemption in their growing friendship with each other.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Cane River
by Lalita Tademy
Follows four generations of African American women from slavery to the early twentieth century as they struggle for economic security and the future of their families along the Cane River in rural Louisiana.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Caramelo
by Sandra Cisneros
During her family's annual car trip from Chicago to Mexico City, Lala Reyes listens to stories about her family, including her grandmother, the descendant of a renowned dynasty of shawl makers, whose magnificent striped shawl has come into Lala's possession.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Catch-22
by Joseph Heller
Presents the contemporary classic depicting the struggles of a United States airman attempting to survive the lunacy and depravity of a World War II airbase.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

Charming Billy
by Alice McDermott
When the late Billy Lynch's relatives and friends gather together to keep his memory alive, stories are woven and memories relived detailing his life in the close Irish-American community and the intricate feelings that resurface.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Cheat and Charmer
by Elizabeth Frank
A richly textured novel set against the backdrop of 1950s Hollywood, the McCarthy era, the blacklist, and expatriate Europe chronicles the story of Dinah Lasker, the wife of a successful producer, writer, and director, who confronts a series of conflicting loyalties when she is subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

China Boy
by Gus Lee
An American-born son of an aristocratic Chinese family struggles with the uncertainties of growing up torn between two cultures in a tough San Francisco neighborhood during the 1950s.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Chocolat
by Joanne Harris
When the beautiful and mysterious Vianne moves to Lansquenet and opens a chocolate shop across from the church, the inhabitants of the tiny village find themselves torn between the solemn law of religion and the joyful rewards of Vianne's confections.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Chosen
by Chaim Potok
A baseball game between Jewish schools is the catalyst that starts a bitter rivalry between two Brooklyn boys and their fathers during the 1940s.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Clothes They Stood Up In
by Alan Bennett
Returning home from the opera, Mr. and Mrs. Ransome discover that their Notting Hill flat has been stripped bare of everything and are forced to adjust to the possibilities of life without the possessions that define them.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier, walks away from the ravages of the Civil War back home to Ada, his prewar sweetheart. Inman's odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South interweaves with Ada's struggle to revive her father's farm.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Cold Sassy Tree
by Olive Ann Burns
Modern times come to a conservative Southern town in 1906 when the proprietor of the general store elopes with a woman half his age, and worse yet, a Yankee.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
The lives of two sisters--Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a southern woman married to a man she hates--are revealed in a series of letters exchanged over thirty years.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Confessions of Max Tivoli
by Andrew Sean Greer
Born as an old man, Max Tivoli lives his life aging backwards, falling in love and living an odd, sometimes terrifying life in San Francisco at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

A Conspiracy of Paper
by David Liss
An outsider in eighteenth-century London, Jewish pugilist and hired thug Benjamin Weaver prowls the city's mean streets in the service of England's gentry tracking down debtors and thieves.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Corelli's Mandolin
by Louis De Berniaeres
A fifty-year epic follows the lives of the residents of the Greek island Cephallonia, exploring their peaceful, remote experiences before the onset of the Second World War.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
What appears as a typical Midwestern family is anything but, as preparations are made for an ideal family holiday. Alfred, the father is losing his fight to control Parkinson's disease and dementia. His wife, Enid is no longer in control of her household and feels her choices slipping away. Their three grown children are struggling with their own lives. But for this Christmas, Enid is determined to bring them together for the perfect family holiday.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Crimson Petal and the White
by Michel Faber
Sugar, an alluring nineteen-year-old prostitute in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for a better life. Her ascent through the strata of 1870's London society offers us intimacy with a host of loveable, maddening and superbly realized characters. At the heart of this novel is the compelling struggle of a young woman trying to lift her body and soul out of the gutter.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
In the 1930s, Billy and his family come to Hidalgo County, New Mexico, where he becomes obsessed with a wild wolf that lives a precarious existence threatened by the region's ranchers.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Crossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner
This deceptively simple story traces the lives and hopes of two couples who met as young parents in Madison, Wisconsin in the early part of the 20th century. Their friendship continues through the years, and provides a glimpse into the transformative power of friendship and marriage.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Crow Lake
by Mary Dawson
In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of members of two families--the farming Pye family and the Morrisons, zoologist Kate Morrison and her three brothers--are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Cry, the Beloved Country
by Alan Paton
A black minister from the country searches for his son, now a criminal, in this story on South African apartheid.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Dancing at the Rascal Fair
by Ivan Doig
From a Scottish port, nineteen-year-olds Angus McCaskill and Rob Barclay embark on a new life in America as homesteaders in the beautiful Two Medicine country of Montana. While forging new lives, the two engage in a fateful contest of the heart in this novel of the uncertainties of friendship and love.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Daughter of fortune
by Isabel Allende
An orphan raised in Valparaiso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849 and meets a Chinese herbalist, who becomes her soul mate, on the journey.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Disgrace
by J.M. Coetzee
In a novel set in post-apartheid South Africa, a fifty-two-year-old college professor who has lost his job for sleeping with a student tries to relate to his daughter, Lucy, who works with an ambitious African farmer.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

The Dive from Clausen's Pier
by Ann Packer
When her fiance is left paralyzed following a tragic accident, a woman begins to question her familiar world, from her everyday life to her relationships, as she sets out to rediscover her own identity.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
by Rebecca Wells
When Siddi inadvertently describes some revealing things about her Southern childhood in a newspaper interview, her mother, Vivi, virtually disowns her. Vivi's lifelong friends, the Ya-Ya's, set in motion a plan to bring the mother and daughter back together using a scrapbook of childhood memories that they ask Vivi to put together.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Dress Lodger
by Sheri Holman
In a novel set in London during the Industrial Revolution, a prostitute borrows a blue dress to attract a higher class of client and is shadowed through the streets by an evil old woman hired by the dress' owner to keep an eye on her.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Drowning Ruth
by Christina Schwarz
A stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
The biblical account of Cain and Abel is echoed in the history of two generations of the Trask family in California.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Ellen Foster
by Kaye Gibbons
Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Embers
by Sandor Marai
Following a forty-one year separation, two men reunite in a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains to share stories and accusations touching on their lives and that of a third person, the now-dead lady of the castle.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The Emperor of Ocean Park
by Stephen L. Carter
After the death of his father, the accomplished, flamboyant, and controversial Judge Oliver Garland, his son Talcott, a law professor, must unravel the truth about his father's life, a quest that brings him face to face with old scandals, family secrets, and justice gone wrong.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

Empire Falls
by Richard Russo
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it's the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town-and seems to believe that "everything" includes Miles himself.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Enemy Women
by Paulette Jiles
An unforgettable story of family, love, and war follows Adair, the daughter of modest farmers in the Missouri Ozarks who is wrongly accused of "enemy collaboration" by the Union militia, as she falls in love with her interrogator, a Union major who orchestrates her escape, and embarks on a perilous journey to find her family.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Evensong
by Gail Godwin
Narrates the life of a young female Episcopal priest in High Balsam, a small, economically distressed Smoky Mountain town, which is shaken up by the arrival of three strangers
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Everything is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Follows a young writer as he travels to the farmlands of Eastern Europe, where he embarks on a quest to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, and, guided by his young Ukrainian translator, he discovers an unexpected past that will resonate far into the future.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

The Facts of Life
by Graham Joyce
A remarkable young boy, Frank Arthur Vine, the product of a passionate encounter between his mother Cassie and an American G.I., is brought up by his mother's six very different--and idiosyncratic--sisters and his charismatic grandmother after his mother is determined to be too unstable, in an emotional and multifaceted novel set against the backdrop of Coventry, England.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Fall on Your Knees
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives -- even destroy them.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Falling Angels
by Tracy Chevalier
In a novel of manners and social divisions set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century England, two girls from different classes become friends, and their families' lives become intertwined in the process.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

A False Sense of Well Being
by Jeanne Braselton
After eleven years of marriage, thirty-eight-year-old Jessie Maddox finds herself in the middle of a midlife crisis as she begins to experience a number of dark fantasies about her husband's untimely end.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

The Feast of Love
by Charles Baxter
From "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
In India during the mid-1970s, after a "state of internal emergency" is declared, four very different people--a widowed seamstress, a student, and a man and his nephew who have fled their village's caste violence--find their lives becoming inextricably intertwined.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Fleur De Leigh's Life of Crime
by Diane Leslie
A witty autobiographical novel follows the adventures and misadventures of an independent teenage girl as she struggles to find meaning in an artificial privileged world and finds friendship with Constantine, a worldly gardener.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Fortune's Rocks
by Anita Shreve
Set on the coast of New Hampshire in 1899, this novel chronicles the love affair of a young woman from a prosperous family, Olympia, and her suitor, a married doctor many years her senior, and the struggles she encounters when she loses her father's support because of the unusual relationship.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Four Spirits
by Sena Jeter Naslund
In the wake of racial tensions in 1960s Alabama, sheltered white college student Stella participates in her first freedom movement and finds her life changed in several ways when she develops friendships with local African Americans.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Friday Night Knitting Club
by Kate Jacobs
Gathering for their weekly knitting club at a small yarn shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a group of friends shares such challenges as raising children, navigating the ups and downs of their careers, and pursuing uncertain relationships.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
by Fannie Flagg
Cleo Threadgood, 86, shares a lifetime of memories of Whistle Stop, Alabama, where the social scene centered on its one cafe with Evelyn Couch, a younger woman who is looking for meaning in her life.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Gap Creek
by Robert Morgan
Set in South Carolina in the early part of the twentieth century, this novel is a compassionate tale of poverty-stricken lives in Appalachia, centered around Julie Harmon who carries on with the farm after her father and brother die.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Gilead
by Marilynne Robinson
As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable secrets about the family of preachers.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Ginger Tree
by Oswald Wynd
A young Scottish woman, in 1903, travels to Peking to marry a British military attachee. She becomes a scandal to the British community by having an affair with Count Kuriha, a Japanese soldier. She is shunned by her own people, and not really accepted by the Japanese either. We are given the account of a hard, lonely, but fascinating life in an alien culture.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

The Girl in Hyacinth Blue
by Susan Vreeland
Vreeland follows the trail of an unknown painting by the Dutch master Vermeer, from present day Philadelphia back in time to the creation of the painting in the artist's household.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier
A poor seventeenth-century servant girl knows her place in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, but when he begins to paint her, nasty whispers and rumors circulate throughout the town.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Girls
by Lori Lansens
At the approach of her thirtieth birday, Rose Darlen attempts to pen her autobiography while remembering the joys and challenges of her life with her conjoined twin sister, Ruby.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
by Melissa Bank
A witty and incisive debut novel follows the life lessons of Jane, from defiant teenager to reluctant career girl, as she makes her way through love, sex, relationships, and workplace perils, prompted by dubious advice from a pop-psych guide to life.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
This Booker Prize-winning novel, praised for its "extraordinary linguistic inventiveness," is set in India in the late 1960s, as young twins grapple with complex family relationships and emotions following a tragedy.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
Wang Lang, a simple peasant farmer, takes as a wife a battered slave girl who becomes an indomitable, loyal woman. Working the land together, they prosper and increase their holdings, yet Wang eventually betrays his family and neglects the earth he had worshiped.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Good Faith
by Jane Smiley
Emerging from an ugly divorce in the early 1980s, real estate salesman Joe Stratford is reluctant to join his friend Marcus in a get-rich-quick scheme and wonders about the advances of a free-spirited married woman.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Good Grief
by Lolly Winston
Grieving over the death of her husband from cancer, thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton finds her personal and professional world in a shambles and, in an attempt to reinvent her life, moves to Ashland, Oregon.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Good Harbor
by Anita Diamant
Follows the growing friendship between fifty-nine-year-old Kathleen, recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and the slightly younger Joyce, increasingly distant from her teenage daughter and struggling to write a second novel.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

The Great Fire
by Shirley Hazzard
In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier find that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

On Green Dolphin Street
by Sebastian Faulks
In 1960, Mary van der Linden, a loyal wife and mother approaching forty, moves with her family from London to Washington, D.C., where she escapes her narrow world for the larger issues of politics and the Cold War with the help of Frank, a New York journalist.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Half a Life
by V.S. Naipaul
The son of a man who, inspired by Gandhi, married below his caste, travels to New York where he struggles to find his identity and forge a career as a writer.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Hanna's Daughters
by Marianne Fredriksson
As Anna holds vigil at her mother's bedside, she longs for reconciliation--not just with her mother, Johanna, but with her grandmother, Hanna, a woman she never really knew. Determined to piece together the fragments of her past, Anna sifts through tattered letters, cracked diaries, and old photographs, as the vivid lives of Hanna and Johanna at last begin to unfold.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Happiness Sold Separately
by Lolly Winston
Discovering that she and her husband are unable to have children, Elinor Mackey finds her carefully ordered world falling apart in the wake of her husband's subsequent affair with a young mother, the woman's violent ex-boyfriend, and her own devotion to an oak tree.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
In a small Georgia mill town during the depression, four misfits form a group that revolves around a deaf-mute whose sole companion has been sent to an insane asylum.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
Discovering a medieval book and a cache of letters, a motherless American girl becomes the latest in a series of historians, including her late father, who investigate the possible surviving legacy of Vlad the Impaler.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Horse Heaven
by Jane Smiley
A novel set in the world of thoroughbred racing follows a group of trainers, jockeys, and "track brats" on a two-year journey through the racing cycle.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Hotel du Lac
by Anita Brookner
A worldly man interrupts the calm, melancholy life of romantic novelist Edith Hope with a "quaintly treacherous proposal of marriage."
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three novellas, intricately interwoven and connected in different ways to Virginia Woolf and her 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, eventually intersect in a conclusion of surprise and beauty.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
The story of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

A House for Mr. Biswas
by V.S. Naipaul
In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fighting against destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only to face a lifetime of calamity. A heartrending, dark comedy of manners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

The House of Sand and Fog
by Andre Dubus
Three fragile yet determined people are drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Ruth, a young girl struggling to overcome haunting family memories in a town which will not let her forget, gradually grows close to Sylvie, the sister of her dead mother.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

How to Be Good
by Nick Hornby
Katie, a liberal, urban mother and doctor from North London, finds her life turned upside down when her husband, David, undergoes an outrageous spiritual transformation, in a hilarious novel about marriage, parenthood, religion, and morality.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

I Capture the Castle
by Dodie Smith
In a classic English story, Cassandra Mortmain chronicles in her diary what happens to her eccentric family when a young American man inherits the local estate. The bittersweet love story that ensues is far more complicated than she ever imagines.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

I Don't Know How She Does It
by Allison Pearson
In a pointed dramatization of the problems of working mothers, Kate Reddy, a hedge fund manager and mother of two, struggles to juggle her professional and personal lives and to balance--often unsuccessfully--the tightrope of work and home.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

I Know This Much is True
by Wally Lamb
Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Icy Sparks
by Gwen Hyman Rubio
In the 1950s, in rural Kentucky, ten-year-old Icy Sparks feels different because she is being raised by her grandparents, and is further ostracized when she begins to show symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome, and eventually comes to prevail over her disorder.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Inheritance of Loss
by Kiran Desai
In a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, but their world--and Sai's romance with her handsome Nepali tutor--is threatened by a Nepalese insurgency.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
A debut collection of short fiction blends elements of Indian traditions with the complexities of American culture in such tales as "A Temporary Matter," in which a young Indian-American couple confronts their grief over the loss of a child, while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Ironweed
by William Kennedy
In 1938, Francis Phelan, a murderer, is reduced to flop houses and hobo jungles and returns to a depressed Albany, where--as a gravedigger--he shuffles his rag tag way to survival.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Jewel
by Bret Lott
A mother fights for the dignity of her youngest daughter against the backdrop of a pure and simple way of life in the backwoods of Mississippi in 1943.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forge a relationship that binds them for more than three decades.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Kaaterskill Falls
by Allegra Goodman
The story of a devout Orthodox Jewish woman, a mother of five spending the summer in a tiny town in upstate New York, who feels the need for a project of her own . . . a secular project, outside her family and her cloistered community.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
A story about a lawyer in a small Alabama town in the l930s whose defense of a Black man arouses the town's prejudice and hostility.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul during the final days of the monarchy. When Amir is forced to flee with his prominent and wealthy father for a new life in California, he leaves behind Hassan, the son of his father's servant. Amir cannot, however, leave the memory of Hassan behind him.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
When a plantation proprietor and former slave--now possessing slaves of his own--dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrolers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Ladder of Years
by Anne Tyler
Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead, mother of three almost-grown children, impulsively walks away from her marriage and sets off into the unknown to begin an entirely new life, but suddenly she discovers that she is accumulating fresh responsibilities.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The Lady and the Unicorn
by Tracy Chevalier
Interweaves historical fact with fiction to explore the mystery behind the creation of the remarkable Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, woven at the end of the fifteenth century, which today hang in the Cluny Museum in Paris.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Lake of Dead Languages
by Carol Goodman
Returning to the Heart Lake School for Girls as a Latin teacher to start a new life with her daughter, Jane is haunted by past tragedy and terrifying memories when she begins receiving menacing messages.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

The Language of Threads
by Gail Tsukiyama
Pei travels with a young orphan named Ji Shen to 1930s Hong Kong, where they receive help from a British woman, but experience the chaos of the Japanese occupation.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

Last Girls
by Lee Smith
Thirty-five years after a trip down the Mississippi on a raft with their classmates, four women are reunited to cruise the river once again where they plan to release the ashes of a fellow rafter, Margaret "Baby" Ballou.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

The Last Time They Met
by Anita Shreve
After Thomas Janes, a celebrated poet, and Linda Fallon, a poet and his childhood sweetheart, meet unexpectedly at a poetry reading in Toronto after 24 years, details of their hidden past are slowly uncovered as the book works its way back through time to the first time they met.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

A Lesson Before Dying
by Ernest J. Gaines
Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man who returns to his hometown to teach, forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, when he is asked to impart his learning and pride to the condemned man.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper's son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The Little Friend
by Donna Tartt
Growing up in a small Mississippi town in a family haunted by the murder of her brother, Robin, Harriet Cleve Dusfresnes lives in a world of her imagination, until, at the age of twelve, she decides to find Robin's murderer and exact her revenge.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The Love of a Good Woman
by Alice Munro
A collection of eight stories explores such themes as the complexities of love, the unexpected implications of passion, and the strange, frequently whimsical desires of the human heart.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Love Medicine
by Louise Erdrich
The lives and destinies of the Kashpaw and the Lamartine families intertwine on and around a North Dakota Indian reservation from 1934 to 1984, in a tale of survival, tenacity, tradition, injustice, and love.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Love Walked In
by Marisa De Los Santos
Harboring romantic notions about golden-age Hollywood film stars, thirty-one-year-old Philadelphia cafe manager Cornelia Brown embarks on a too-good-to-be-true relationship with the debonair Martin Grace, while across town, an eleven-year-old abandoned girl seeks out her estranged father.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
The spirit of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon describes her murder, her surprise at her new home in heaven, and her witness to her family's grief, efforts to find the killer, and attempts to come to terms with what has happened.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Loving Frank
by Nancy Horan
Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
A murder investigation requires private detective Sam Spade--a man of few words who displays little emotion--to become involved in a dangerous search for a valuable statue.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
by Oscar Hijuelos
Two Cuban musicians, recent immigrants, come to New York, becoming the Mambo Kings. Their families, fellow musicians, lovers, triumphs and tragedies are portrayed in this rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss, memory and desire.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

March
by Geraldine Brooks
In a story inspired by the father character in Little Women and drawn from the journals and letters of Louisa May Alcott's father Bronson, a man leaves behind his family to serve in the Civil War and finds his marriage and beliefs profoundly challenged by his experiences
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
by Steven Millhauser
A young entrepreneur in late-nineteenth-century New York City, Martin Dressler rises from helper in his father's cigar store as an elusive dream and his love for two sisters comes to life in the Grand Cosmo, an extravagant hotel.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Master Butcher's Singing Club
by Louise Erdrich
Returning to his quiet German village home after World War I, trained killer Fidelis Waldvogel, accompanied by his new wife, starts a new life in America and finds his life irrevocably changed by a new relationship.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden
Because her mother is dying and her father old, Chiyo, nine, is sold to a wealthy geisha house in Gion where she learns her trade and works it in the 1930s and 1940s.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Memory of War
by Frederick Busch
When a new patient declares that he is his half-brother, psychologist Alexander Lescziak, the son of Polish immigrants, confronts painful truths about his life as he envisions his mother's relationship with a German prisoner of war.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
A young girl discovers she's actually a hermaphrodite in her teen years. This is a story of her family's history beginning with their escape from Greece as well as her own experiences growing up in Detroit in the 1960's.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs, and telepathic powers link him with the other children born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Midwives
by Chris Bohjalian
An obstetrician and the daughter of a respected midwife from a rural Vermont community recounts the summer of her thirteenth year, when her mother stood accused of murdering a woman during a difficult delivery.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Miracle of Edgar Mint
by Brady Udall
Half Apache and orphaned, Edgar's trials begin on an Arizona reservation at the age of seven when he is run over by the mailman's jeep, after which he is taken from the hospital to a school for delinquents to a Mormon foster family, and eventually to an unexpected home on a quest for the mailman. Reader's Guide available.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Mistress of Spices
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Tilo, an Indian clairvoyant, becomes queen of the pirates who kidnapped her for her powers, and she gains immortality and the skills of a mistress of spices, which she uses to help mortals before falling in love with Raven.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Mists of Avalon
by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Retells the legend of Arthur as perceived by Viviane, the Lady of the Lake and high priestess of Avalon, Arthur's mother Igraine, his Christian wife Guinevere, and the sorceress Morgaine.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

Mrs. Kimble
by Jennifer Haigh
Follows twenty-five years in the life of Ken Kimble as seen through the eyes of his three wives, from Birdie, who struggles with his abandonment; to heiress Joan, who is recovering from a personal loss; to Dinah, who suffers from an unhappy past.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

My Antonia
by Willa Cather
In the late nineteenth century, Antonia, a fourteen-year-old immigrant girl from Bohemia, and Jim Burden, a ten-year-old orphan boy, arrive in Black Hawk, Nebraska, and in teaching each other form a friendship that will last a lifetime.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

My Name is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
In sixteenth-century Istanbul, a furor erupts when the Sultan hires a group of artists to illuminate a great book in the European style at a time in which all figurative art is considered Islamic heresy, but the situation becomes worse when one of the miniaturists vanishes.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

My Sister's Keeper
by Jodi Picoult
Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
An incisive portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The News from Paraguay
by Lily Tuck
Pursued by the future dictator of nineteenth-century Paraguay, Irish courtesan Ella Lynch struggles with isolation and displacement in spite of her power as his mistress, and witnesses the nation's victimization in the wake of her lover's arrogant ambitions.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Night
by Elie Wiesel
The narrative of a boy who lived through Auschwitz and Buchenwald provides a short and terrible indictment of modern humanity.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
by Alexander McCall Smith
PI "Precious" Ramotswe sets up a detective agency in Botswana on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, making her the only female detective in the country. Eventually, troubled people come to Precious with a variety of concerns. Potentially philandering husbands, seemingly schizophrenic doctors, and a missing boy who may have been killed by witch doctors all compel Precious to roam about in her tiny van, searching for clues.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

On Green Dolphin Street
by Sebastian Faulks
In 1960, Mary van der Linden, a loyal wife and mother approaching forty, moves with her family from London to Washington, D.C., where she escapes her narrow world for the larger issues of politics and the Cold War with the help of Frank, a New York journalist.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

That Old Ace in the Hole
by Annie Proulx
Assigned to locate land in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma that can be purchased and converted into pig farms for his employer, Bob Dollar meets the residents of Woolybucket and comes to respect their fierce desire to retain their land.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
The world of Olive Kitteridge, a retired school teacher in a small coastal town in Maine, is revealed in stories that explore her diverse roles in many lives, including a lounge singer haunted by a past love, her stoic husband, and her own resentful son.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Open House
by Elizabeth Berg
After a devastating divorce, Samantha Morrow decides to take in border to meet the mortgage payments and support her 11-year-old son. In the process, Samantha learns how to re-create her life by opening her house and heart to strangers and new possibilities.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Other Boleyn Girl
by Philippa Gregory
The daughters of a ruthlessly ambitious family, Mary and Anne Boleyn are sent to the court of Henry VIII to attract the attention of the king, who first takes Mary as his mistress, in which role she bears him an illegitimate son, and then Anne as his wife.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Palace Walk
by Naguib Mahfous
This extraordinary novel provides a close look into Cairo society at the end of World War I. Mahfouz's vehicle for this examination is the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad, a middle-class merchant who runs his family strictly according to the Koran and directs his own behavior according to his desires. Consequently, while his wife and two daughters remain cloistered at home, and his three sons live in fear of his harsh will, al-Sayyid Ahmad nightly explores the pleasures of Cairo.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Paradise
by Toni Morrison
Captures the dreams, memories, conflicts, and complex interior lives of the citizens of a small, all-Black town as four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near the town during the 1970s, in a novel that blends past, present, and future
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Patty Jane's House of Curl
by Lorna Landvik
Centering around a Minneapolis beauty parlor that also functions as a women's support group, this novel explores the loves, losses, hopes, and victories experienced by Patty Jane and Harriet, two eccentric sisters
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Peace Like a River
by Leif Enger
Set in 1950s rural Minnesota, Enger weaves spirituality into this coming-of-age quest novel. The family's search for one of it's sons is at once a heroic quest, a tragedy, a love story, and a haunting meditation on the possibility of magic in the everyday world.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Piano Tuner
by Daniel Mason
In 1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake leaves his quiet life in London for the jungles of Burma, where he has been asked to repair a rare Erard grand piano belonging to a British army surgeon-major who uses the piano and music to help keep the peace among warring local Burmese princes.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Pigs in Heaven
by Barbara Kingsolver
When Turtle witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her mother responds and a man's life is saved, but their lives are changed by the incident, in the award-winning sequel to The Bean Trees.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
Set in twelfth-century England, this epic of kings and peasants juxtaposes the building of a magnificent church with the violence and treachery that often characterized the Middle Ages.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

The Pilot's Wife
by Anita Shreve
The wife of a pilot who has been killed in a crash determines to find out the truth behind a bizarre mystery that has surfaced around his private life.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Plainsong
by Kent Haruf
An unlikely extended family is formed when a high school teacher helps a pregnant student make a home with two elderly bachelor ranchers.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
A fanatical evangelical Baptist preacher takes his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo, where the family's fate intersects with that of the newly independent war-torn country.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Possession
by A.S. Byatt
Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, two rather unfulfilled young literary scholars, unexpectedly become figures of romance as they discover a surprising link between the two poets on whom they are authorities. Byatt deftly plays with literary genres--Romantic quest, campus satire, detective story, myth, fairy tale--as Maud and Roland become deeply involved in the unfolding story of a secret relationship between the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Elizabeth Bennett is young, clever and attractive, but her mother is a nightmare and she and her four sisters are in dire need of financial security and escape in the shape of husbands. The arrival of nice Mr. Bingley and arrogant Mr. Darcy in the neighborhood turns all their lives upside down.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

The Prodigal Summer
by Barbara Kingsolver
Three stories of human love are woven together within a larger tapestry of lives amid the mountains and farms of southern Appalachia. Over the course of one humid summer, this novel's intriguing protagonists face disparate predicaments but find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

The Reader
by Bernard Schlink
Not until he becomes a law student after World War II does Michael Berg realize that the woman who found him ill and nursed him through hepatitis was illiterate and possibly a Nazi war criminal.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Red Tent
by Anita Diamant
The story of Dinah, a tragic character from the Bible whose great love, a prince, is killed by her brother, leaving her alone and pregnant. The novel traces her life from childhood to death, in the process examining sexual and religious practices of the day, and what it meant to be a woman.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Samurai's Garden
by Gail Tsukiyama
In 1938, on the eve of World War II, a young Chinese man suffering from tuberculosis travels to his family's summer home in Japan, where his encounters with a lovely Japanese girl and four local residents prove to be memorable.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Saturday
by Ian McEwan
A successful, happily married neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne is drawn into a confrontation with Baxter, a small-time thug, following a minor motor vehicle accident, an encounter that has savage consequences.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Sea Glass
by Anita Shreve
When Honora and Sexton Beecher are rendered penniless by the crash of the stock market, Sexton is forced to work in a nearby mill that is plagued by violence, and as they try to reconstruct their lives, they are confronted by passions of every kind.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
A transfer student from a small town in California, Richard Papen is determined to affect the ways of his Hampden College peers, and he begins his intense studies under the tutelage of eccentric Julian Morrow.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd
When Lily's "stand-in mother" insults the racists in town, Lily knows it's time to leave. They end up being taken in by a trio of black beekeeping sisters who lead her to the single thing her heart longs for most.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

A Separate Peace
by John Knowles
The novel focuses on the reminiscences of Gene Forrester who returns to the boarding school he attended during the early years of World War II
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

The Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author's works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Ship Fever
by Andrea Barrett
A collection of stories that consider the struggles of love and science includes the title work, in which a young Canadian doctor, treating Irish immigrants who have been driven out by the Great Famine, experiences one of history's most tragic epidemics.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
An unsuccessful newspaperman, his aunt, and his two young daughters experience delicately evoked changes in a poignant novel set in a Newfoundland fishing town.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
Losing touch with his creative nature by years of lonely political exile, Turkish poet Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral and learns about a series of suicides among pious girls forbidden to wear headscarves, a story that brings him face-to-face with militant Islam, a new romance, and his own atheism.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Snow Falling on Cedars
by David Guterson
San Piedro Island in Puget Sound is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese-American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
by Lisa See
An evocative story of friendship set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century China in which women suffered from foot binding, isolation, and illiteracy follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Snow Mountain Passage
by James D. Houston
The hardships, tragedy, and devastating starvation that confronted the Donner party, which became trapped by winter snows in the Sierra Nevadas before they can make their way into California, are seen through the eyes of James Frazier Reed and his eight-year-old daughter, Patty.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Soul Mountain
by Gao Xingjian
A man fleeing from the repressive social conformity required by China's communist government journeys into the remote mountain regions of southwest China in search of meaning in his life and the elusive Soul Mountain.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The Speed of Light
by Elizabeth Rosner
Growing up in a house filled with silence and devoid of emotion, siblings Julian, a scientist who lives a life of seclusion, and Paula, a talented opera singer, must confront and overcome the past when dark secrets resurface.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
In this Pulitzer Prize winning book, Daisy Goodwill attempts to understand her place in the world as she nears the end of her life. She narrates her own biography, from her birth in Manitoba in 1905 when she loses her mother to childbirth, through her college years, her marriages and her work as a newspaper columnist.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Stones from the River
by Ursula Hegi
Spanning both World Wars, this novel is narrated by dwarf Trudi Montag, the town gossip, historian and librarian, who chronicles the lives of the ordinary residents inhabiting small rural town in Germany and the growing impact of the Nazi regime on their lives.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

A Sudden Country
by Karen Fisher
His life turned upside down by the deaths of his children from smallpox and desertion of his Nez Perce wife, Hudson's Bay Company trader James MacLaren joins a group of settlers headed west to Oregon in 1847 and encounters Lucy Mitchell, the wife of his employer, a woman who helps him confront his past, present, and future.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

Suite Francaise
by Irene Nemirovsky
Published more than sixty years following the author's death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"A Storm in June, " set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neal Hurston
Meet the unforgettable Janie Crawford, an articulate black woman in the 1930s. This story traces Janie's quest for identity, through three marriages, on a journey to her roots.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Achebe's first novel chronicles the life of Okonkwo, the leader of an Igbo (Ibo) community, from the events leading up to his banishment from the community for accidentally killing a clansman, through the seven years of his exile, to his return. The novel addresses the problem of the intrusion in the 1890s of white missionaries and colonial government into tribal Igbo society. It describes the simultaneous disintegration of its protagonist Okonkwo and of his village. The novel was praised for its intelligent and realistic treatment of tribal beliefs and of psychological disintegration coincident with social unraveling.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
Heroic young men carry the emotional weight of their lives to war in Vietnam in a patchwork account of a modern journey into the heart of darkness.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Mariam and Laila are born a generation apart but are are brought together by war and fate. Together they endure the dangers surrounding them and discover the power of both love and sacrifice.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

The Three Junes
by Julia Glass
Reveals the interconnected lives, loves, and relationships of different generations of the McLeod family over the course of three crucial summers.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition that casts Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Tortilla Curtain
by T.C. Boyle
The lives of two very different couples--wealthy Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher, and Candido and America Rincon, a pair of Mexican illegals--suddenly collide, in a story that unfolds from the shifting viewpoints of the various characters.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
Armed with her idealism and determination, young Francie Nolan struggles to escape from the poverty of life in a Brooklyn tenement during the early 1900s.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters
by Elisabeth Robinson
Unemployed actress Olivia Hunt leaves Hollywood to return home at the request of her younger sister, Madeleine, and finds herself struggling to help her sister, keep her parents under control, and reconnect with an old boyfriend.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
Interweaves story and dream, past and present, and philosophy and poetry in the sardonic and erotic tale of two couples--Tomas and Teresa, and Sabina and her Swiss lover, Gerhart.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Unless
by Carol Shields
Novelist Reta Winter's idyllic life is shattered when her eldest daughter abandons her life to sit on a gritty street corner with a sign reading "GOODNESS" around her neck, a situation that prompts Reta to uncover what drove her daughter to her new existence.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Virgin Blue
by Tracy Chevalier
A dark, mysterious tale that weaves the stories of two women in two different centuries into an increasingly complex web-twentieth-century Ella, who dreams in blue when she moves to southwestern France, and sixteenth-century Isabelle, Ella's ancestor, who had been persecuted as a suspected witch.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

A Virtuous Woman
by Kaye Gibbons
She was the 20 year-old daughter of Carolina gentry. He was a 40 year-old skinny tenant farmer. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Waiting
by Ha Jin
An ambitious and dedicated Chinese doctor, Lin Kong finds himself torn between two very different women--the educated and dynamic nurse with whom he has fallen in love and the traditional, meek, and humble woman to whom his family married him when they were both very young.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

We Were the Mulvaneys
by Joyce Carol Oates
A family of six disintegrates after a daughter is raped by a high-school student. It happens to the wealthy Mulvaneys in upstate New York. The disgrace--there is some question if it was rape--sends the father to drink and financial ruin, the girl leaves home, the others follow.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Weight of Water
by Anita Shreve
A double narrative set on and around an island off the coast of New Hampshire. A vacationing woman investigates the house and environs where a murder took place more than 100 years ago.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

When the Emperor Was Divine
by Julie Otsuka
A story told from five different points of view chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

When Madeline Was Young
by Jane Hamilton
When Aaron Maciver's beautiful young wife, Madeline, suffers brain damage in a bike accident, she is left with the intellectual powers of a six-year-old. In the years that follow, Aaron and his second wife care for Madeline with deep tenderness and devotion as they raise two children of their own.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

When We Were Orphans
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early 20th century Shanghai, is orphaned at age nine when both his parents disappear under suspicious circumstances. He grows up to become a renowned detective, and more than 20 years later, returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of the disappearance.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Where the Heart Is
by Billie Letts
A girl, pregnant and seventeen, is abandoned in Oklahoma by her boyfriend. Patching together a new life, she finds a way to help others as they help her.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

While I Was Gone
by Sue Miller
When an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo's life begins to unravel: seduced again by the enticing possibility of another self and another life, she begins a dangerous flirtation that returns her to the darkest moment of her past and imperils all she loves.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

White Noise
by Don De Lillo
Jack Gladney, a professor of Nazi history at a Middle American liberal arts school, and his family comically try to handle normal family life as a black cloud of lethal gaseous fumes threatens their town.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

White Oleander
by Janet Fitch
When a woman murders a former lover and is imprisoned for life, her daughter must navigate a new reality--that of a series of foster homes, each its own universe, each with its own limits and dangers.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
Set in post-war London, this novel of the racial, political, and social upheaval of the last half-century follows two families--the Joneses and the Iqbals, both outsiders from within the former British empire--as they make their way in modern England.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

A Widow for One Year
by John Irving
Chronicles the life of a complex, abrasive woman born in the shadow of her siblings' deaths and her parents' adultery, who only finds love after motherhood and widowhood.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Woman Hollering Creek
by Sandra Cisneros
A collection of short stories by the Chicana writer which explores life on both sides of the Mexican border.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Women of the Silk
by Gail Tsukiyama
Sent by her family to work in a silk factory just prior to World War II, young Pei grows to womanhood, working fifteen-hour days and sending her pay to the family who abandoned her.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

The World Below
by Sue Miller
After being diagnosed at nineteen with tuberculosis in 1919, a young woman is sent to a sanitarium, where she rediscovers the pleasures of unfettered youth and falls in love with a doomed man, in a novel that follows the lives of two women of two very different generations.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks
Young Anna Frith, a vicar's maid, is faced with the loss of her family, the disintegration of her local community, and a passionate, illicit love as she and her village confront the horrors of the plague, in a historical novel based on real-life events in seventeenth-century England.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
by Michael Dorris
A novel narrated by three women of mixed Native American background: Rayona, Christine and Ida, granddaughter, daughter and mother, set in part in the Pacific Northwest.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8