Reader's Link - Book Kits (Fiction)

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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: 11

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: 8

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: 12

Portrait in Sepia
by Isabel Allende
Lacking all memory of the first five years of her life because of a brutal trauma, Aurora del Valle is raised by her regal grandmother Paulina and eventually seeks to confront the mystery of her past.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

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

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: 10

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

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: 12

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: 9

The Sea
by John Banville
Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
The lives of fifty-four-year-old concierge Rene Michel and extremely bright, suicidal twelve-year-old Paloma Josse are transformed by the arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
Follows a middle-aged man as he reflects on a past he thought was behind him, until he is presented with a legacy that forces him to reconsider different decisions, and to revise his place in the world.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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: 6

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: 7

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

What We Keep
by Elizabeth Berg
A touching, compassionate novel of childhood and family by the author of Joy School follows one woman on a cross-country journey to see her long-estranged mother, which sparks memories of the summer she turned twelve.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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

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: 8

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

Moloka'i
by Alan Brennert
Seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family's 1890s Honolulu home when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her to reenter the world.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

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

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: 10

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: 11

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: 11

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: 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: 11

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: 9

The Yiddish Policemen's Union
by Michael Chabon
In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addled chess prodigy.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

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 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

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: 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: 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

Little Bee
by Chris Cleave
A tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women.
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: 12

Disgrace
by J.M. Coetzee
Written with austere clarity , Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes with unforgettable, almost unbearable vividness the plight of South Africa-a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of the overthrow of Apartheid.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

Pope Joan
by Donna Woolfolk Cross
Rebelling against medieval strictures forbidding the education of women, young Joan assumes the identity of her murdered brother and is initiated into the monastery of Fulda, where she distinguishes herself as a great Christian scholar before relocating to Rome and becoming a powerful force in religious politics.
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

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

Song of the Exile
by Kiana Davenport
In spellbinding, sensual prose, Song of the Exile follows the fortunes of the Meahuna family--and the odyssey of one resilient man searching for his soul mate after she is torn from his side by the forces of war. From the turbulent years of World War II through Hawaii's complex journey to statehood, this mesmerizing story presents a cast of richly imagined characters who rise up magnificent and forceful, redeemed by the spiritual power and the awesome beauty of their islands.
Approximate number of books in kit: 5

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

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

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: 12

Sarah's Key
by Tatiana de Rosnay
On the anniversary of the roundup of Jews by the French police in Paris, Julia is asked to write an article on this dark episode and embarks on an investigation that leads her to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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: 12

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 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 Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Living with an Old World mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and believes that a longstanding family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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

A Northern Light
by Jennifer Donnelly
In 1906, sixteen-year-old Mattie, determined to attend college and be a writer against the wishes of her father and fiance, takes a job at a summer inn where she discovers the truth about the death of a guest.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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: 9

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: 12

Justine
by Lawrence Durrell
The Egyptian city of Alexandria once boasted the world's greatest library, home to scholars dedicated solely to the pursuit of knowledge. But on the eve of World War II, the obsessed characters in this mesmerizing novel find that their pursuits lead only to bedrooms in which each seeks to know-and possess-the other.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky
by Heidi W. Durrow
After a family tragedy orphans her, Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., moves into her grandmother's mostly black community in the 1980s, where she must swallow her grief and confront her identity as a biracial woman in a world that wants to see her as either black or white.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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

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: 10

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: 8

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: 12

The Sweet By & By
by Sara Evans
Jade has worked so hard to put her hard-scrabble childhood behind her. And she's found everything she wanted in the beautiful green hills of Whisper Hollow, Tennessee. A thriving vintage shop all her own. A lovely one-eyed shepherd dog named Roscoe. And Max, the almost-too-good-to-be-true man she plans to marry in just a few weeks. For the first time in her life, her heart feels at home, and she can't wait to step out into their beautiful future.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
by Jim Fergus
A vivid portrait of the American West follows May Dodd as she leaves the East Coast asylum to which she had been committed by her high-society family, heads west, and, with the help of a government program, ends up marrying a chief of the Cheyenne nation.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

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

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 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

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
by Jamie Ford
When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered in Seattle, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti-Japanese sentiment.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

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

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

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

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

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: 12

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

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: 8

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: 8

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: 10

The Cookbook Collector
by Allegra Goodman
While executive Emily questions her choices about her career and a long-distance relationship with a successful man, her environmental activist sister, Jessamine, struggles with her own doubts about her beliefs and love affair.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Reliable Wife
by Robert Goolrick
Ralph Truitt, a wealthy businessman with a troubled past who lives in a remote nineteenth-century Wisconsin town, has advertised for a reliable wife; and his ad is answered by Catherine Land, a woman who makes every effort to hide her own dark secrets.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

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: 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

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

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

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: 11

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: 8

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: 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 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: 10

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: 11

Into The Forest
by Jean Hegland
A delicately wrought modern fable about values, both of individual and of society, tells the moving story of two sisters struggling to survive while too much technology and information overwhelms the world around them.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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: 6

The Dovekeepers
by Alice Hoffman
A tale inspired by the massacre of hundreds of Jewish people at Masada presents the stories of a hated daughter, a baker's wife, a girl disguised as a warrior, and a medicine woman who keep doves and secrets while Roman soldiers draw near.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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: 12

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

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

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: 7

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

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

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

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

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: 9

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: 11

The Orphan Master's Son
by Adam Johnson
The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. By the author of Parasites Like Us.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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

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: 8

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: 11

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

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: 10

The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver
Harrison William Shepherd, a highly observant writer, is caught between two worlds--in Mexico, working for communists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Leon Trotsky, and later in America, where he is caught up in the patriotism of World War II.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

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

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: 10

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: 7

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: 10

History of Love
by Nicole Krauss
Sixty years after a book's publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl named for one of the book's characters seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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: 9

Girl In Translation
by Jean Kwok
Emigrating with her mother from Hong Kong to Brooklyn, Kimberly begins a double life as a schoolgirl by day and sweatshop worker at night, an existence also marked by her first crush and the pressure to save her family from poverty.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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

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

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

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 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: 11

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
by Steig Larsson
Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family, her octogenarian uncle hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

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: 12

The Piano Teacher
by Janice Y.K. Lee
It is 1942, and Will Trusdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, has fallen headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But when WWII strikes, Will is sent to an internment camp, while Trudy remains outside. Trudy is forced to form dangerous alliances with the head of the Japanese gendarmerie, whose desperate attempts to locate a priceless collection of Chinese art lead to a chain of terrible betrayals. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and meets the enigmatic Will. As long-buried secrets start to emerge and she begins to understand the true nature of the world she has entered, Claire learns that sometimes the price of survival is love.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem
Lionel Essrog has always respected Frank Minna, who helped him out when he was young, and when Frank is found dead, Lionel and his friends, the Minna Men, scour the streets of Brooklyn in search of the killer.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

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

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: 6

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

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

Wolf Hall
by Hilary Mantel
Assuming the power recently lost by the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell counsels a mercurial Henry VIII on the latter's efforts to marry Anne Boleyn against the wishes of Rome, a successful endeavor that comes with a dangerous price.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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

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

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

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 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

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

Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
In 1974 Manhattan, a radical young Irish monk struggles with personal demons while making his home among Bronx prostitutes, a group of mothers shares grief over their lost Vietnam soldier sons, and a young grandmother attempts to prove her worth.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

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 Giant's House: A Romance
by Elizabeth McCracken
The year is 1950 and, at 26, librarian Peggy Cort feels as though love and life have passed her by. Until the day James Carlson Sweatt, the "over-tall" 11-year-old who's the talk of the town, walks into the library and changes her life forever.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

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

Thousand Pieces of Gold
by Ruthanne Lum McCunn
Lalu Nathoy's father called his thirteen-year-old daughter his treasure, his "thousand pieces of gold," yet when famine strikes northern China in 1871, he is forced to sell her. Polly, as Lalu is later called, is sold to a brothel, sold again to a slave merchant bound for America, auctioned to a saloonkeeper, and offered as a prize in a poker game. This biographical novel is the extraordinary story of one woman's fight for independence and dignity in the American West.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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

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: 12

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: 6

The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
Follows the life of Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, as she navigates 1920s Paris.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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: 10

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

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: 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: 11

The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet
by David Mitchell
Dispatched to the influential Japanese port of Dejima in 1799, ambitious clerk Jacob de Zoet resolves to earn enough money to deserve his wealthy fiancâee, an effort that is challenged by his relationship with the midwife daughter of a samurai.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

A Gate at the Stairs
by Lorrie Moore
In the Midwest just after the September 11 attacks, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin comes of age amid such challenges as racism, the War on Terror, and cruelty in the name of love, as she leaves her family's farm to attend college and takes a part-time job as a nanny.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

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

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 Season of Lillian Dawes
by Katherine Mosby
Relates the story of two brothers--Gabriel Gibbs and his older brother Spencer--who fall in love with the same woman, the free-spirited, mysterious Lillian Dawes, in Greenwich village in the 1950s.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Open Secrets
by Alice Munro
A collection of short stories in which women take the center stage includes the tale of a heart patient who experiences a revelation about an old love and that of a young woman struggling with a long-hidden secret.
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: 11

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

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: 11

Netherland
by Joseph O'Neill
Abandoned amid the offbeat inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel when his English wife and son return to London following September 11th, Hans, a banker originally from the Netherlands, struggles to find himself in his adopted country.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

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: 11

The Tiger's Wife
by Tea Obreht
Struggling to understand why her beloved grandfather left his family to die alone in a field hospital far from home, a young doctor in a war-torn Balkan country takes over her grandfather's search for a mythical ageless vagabond while referring to a worncopy of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book."
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

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: 10

Animal Farm
by George Orwell
A satire on totalitarianism in which farm animals overthrow their human owner and set up their own government.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

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: 7

The Buddha in the Attic
by Julie Otsuka
Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

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: 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

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: 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: 11

State of Wonder
by Ann Patchett
A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh must step out of her comfort zone when she is sent into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years--a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.
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: 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: 6

The Tenderness of Wolves
by Stef Penney
When her teenage son disappears in the aftermath of a brutal murder, a determined mother sets out from her snow-covered nineteenth-century settlement to find him, an effort that is hampered by vigilante groups and the harrowing forces of nature.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson
After a meeting with his only neighbor, sixty-seven-year-old Trond is forced to reflect upon a long-ago incident that marks the beginning of a series of losses for Trond and his childhood friend, Jon.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

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: 12

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

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: 10

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: 12

The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
In a novel of alternative history, aviation hero and isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, negotiating a cordial accord with Adolf Hitler, accepting his conquest of Europe and anti-Semitic policies, and igniting a storm of fear for Jewish families throughout America.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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

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

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: 6

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: 10

The Catcher in the Rye
by J.D. Salinger
In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

Push (also titled Precious)
by Sapphire
A courageous and determined young teacher opens up a new world of hope and redemption for sixteen-year-old Precious Jones, an abused young African American girl living in Harlem who was raped and left pregnant for the second time by her father.
Approximate number of books in kit: 8

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 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

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

Shanghai Girls
by Lisa See
Forced to leave Shanghai when their father sells them to California suitors, sisters May and Pearl struggle to adapt to life in 1930s Los Angeles while still bound to old customs, as they face discrimination and confront a life-altering secret.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

Peony in Love
by Lisa See
In seventeenth-century China, three women become emotionally involved with The Peony Pavilion, a famed opera rumored to cause lovesickness and even death, including Peony, the cloistered daughter of a wealthy scholar, who succumbs to its spell only to return after her death as a "hungry ghost" to haunt her former fiance, who has married another.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield
Having spent sixty years creating a series of alternate identities for herself, enigmatic Vida Winter pens a painful letter to young Margaret Lea when the latter begs her to disclose the truth about her secretive birth.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer
In January 1946 writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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

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

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: 11

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: 10

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: 7

We Need to Talk About Kevin
by Lionel Shriver
Eva Khatchadourian writes to her estranged husband Frank, trying to solve what went wrong in raising their son Kevin after he kills seven classmates and a teacher in his high school in upstate New York.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
by Helen Simonson
Forced to confront the realities of life in the 21st century when he falls in love with widowed Pakistani descendant Mrs. Ali, a retired Major Pettigrew finds the relationship challenged by local prejudices that view Mrs. Ali, a Cambridge native, as a perpetual foreigner.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

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

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

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

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: 12

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

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: 8

The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
by Mary Helen Stefaniak
Eleven-year-old Gladys Califf and her Depression-era community are turned upside down when a worldly teacher, who is fascinated with all things Arabian, moves into the small town.
Approximate number of books in kit: 7

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: 9

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: 12

The Art of Racing in the Rain
by Garth Stein
Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher's soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe's maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets : a novel
by Garth Stein
When his son's mother dies and leaves him a single parent to Dean, a fourteen-year-old boy he has never met, Evan Wallace is forced to confront his music career and his epilepsy.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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

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: 10

The Help
by Kathryn Stockett
Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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: 12

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: 7

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: 11

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

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 Good Thief
by Hannah Tinti
Growing up in a New England orphanage unaware of his family and how he lost his left hand as an infant, twelve-year-old Ren is terrified of the future until a young man shows up claiming to be his long-lost brother.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9

The Fellowship of the Ring
by J.R.R. Tolkien
In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in THE HOBBIT. In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

The Two Towers
by J.R.R. Tolkien
Recounts the deeds of the individual members of the Fellowship of the Ring after being divided by an attack of the orc-soldiers, following Frodo and his servant Samwise on their continuing quest to destroy the Ring of Power in the Mountain of Fire.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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: 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

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: 10

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

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

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: 10

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

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: 11

The Hummingbird's Daughter
by Luis Alberto Urrea
When sixteen-year-old Teresita, the illegitimate and beloved daughter of a powerful late-nineteenth-century rancher, arises from death possessing the power to heal, she is declared a saint and finds her family and faith tested by the impending Mexican civil war.
Approximate number of books in kit: 6

Cutting for Stone
by Abraham Verghese
Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.
Approximate number of books in kit: 12

Slaughterhouse-Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim survives capture by the Gemans in World War II, the Dresden bombings, and the struggle for financial success only to be kidnapped in a flying saucer and taken to the planet Tralfamadore.
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: 10

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

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: 11

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: 6

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
by David Wroblewski
A tale reminiscent of "Hamlet" that also celebrates the alliance between humans and dogs follows speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar, who bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.
Approximate number of books in kit: 10

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: 11

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: 12

The Shack
by William Paul Young
Four years after his daughter is abducted and evidence of her murder is found in an abandoned shack, Mackenzie Allen Philips returns to the shack in response to a note claiming to be from God, and has a life-changing experience.
Approximate number of books in kit: 11

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

The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
Approximate number of books in kit: 9