Absolute Power
by David Baldacci
Burglar Luther Whitney is forced to run for his life after
he sees Secret Service agents shoot and kill a wealthy, young socialite
whose affair with the President of the United States had gotten out of
control.
Carrie
A repressed teenager uses her telekinetic power to avenger the cruel jokes of her classmates.
by Joseph Heller
A bombardier, based in Italy during World War II, repeatedly tries to avoid flying bombing missions while his colonel tries to get him killed by demanding that he fly more and more missions
by J. D. Salinger
An adolescent boy, knowing he is about to be dropped by his school, spends three days and nights in New York City.
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
by Dan Brown
Cryptographer Susan Fletcher finds herself fighting for her country, her life, and the life of the man she loves when she is called in by the National Security Agency to decipher a mysterious code and discovers a plot that has the power to cripple U.S. intelligence.
by Ann Packer
Twenty-three-year-old Carrie Bell, engaged to her high school sweetheart, is ready to make a break from a life that has become suffocating in its sameness, but her decision is complicated when her fiancee is paralyzed in a diving accident and everyone expects her to stay and care for him.
by Rebecca Wells
Siddalee Walker, a successful theater director, is thrown into a void of uncertainty when she has a falling out with her mother over a New York Times article in which Vivi is characterized as an abusive parent, and the Ya Ya’s lifelong girlfriends, conspire to restore the mother-daughter relationship.
by Jasper Fforde
Thursday Next, a Special Operative in literary detection in a time-altered Great Britain in which messing with the classics is a punishable offense, sets out to apprehend a criminal who is murdering characters from works of literature and has chosen Jane Eyre as his next victim.
by Margaret Mitchell
Willful and pampered Scarlett O'Hara's strength of character carries her thought the deprivations of the Civil War, but her infatuation with Ashley Wilkes keeps her from recognizing her true love until it is too late
by Pat Conroy
Eighteen-year-old Ben's attempts to stand up for himself, his mother, and his sister are resisted by his intolerant father, a fighter pilot and inflexible disciplinarian.
by Carson McCullers
A quiet, sensitive girl searches for beauty in a small, but damned Southern town.
The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova
A young woman discovers an ancient book and a cache of old letters in her father's library, and thus begins her adventurous quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, a search that will span continents and generations, and a confrontation with the darkest powers of evil.
by Susanna Clarke
Magician, Mr. Norrel of Hurtfew Abbey, uses his powers against Napoleon and the French in 1806 and is soon challenged by Jonathan Strange, a novice magician, who becomes obsessed with the Raven King, the twelfth-century founder of English magic and bizarre forms of magic.
The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Amir, haunted by his betrayal of Hassan, the son of his father's servant and a childhood friend, returns to Kabul as an adult after he learns Hassan has been killed, in an attempt to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son from a life of slavery to a Taliban official.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
by Kim Edwards
Dr. David Henry, forced to deliver his own twins during a snowstorm in 1964 with only a nurse to help him, makes a decision that has far-reaching effects on his life, and the lives of his wife and son, when his infant daughter is born with Down Syndrome, and in a vain attempt to protect his wife, he orders the nurse to take the baby to an institution.
by Ann Patchett
Rose, married for three years, decides she has made a mistake and leaves her husband, traveling from California to Kentucky to take up residence in a home for unwed mothers where she plans to have her baby and give it up for adoption, but she soon discovers life still holds some surprises
A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving
n eleven-year-old boy, Owen Meany, hits a foul ball that kills his best friend's mother during a Little League game in 1953. Owen believes he was God's instrument during the incident
Prep
by Chris Settenfeld
Midwesterner, Lee Fiora is sent by her father to a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts where she manages to survive in spite of the social differences between her and her classmates
The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kid
Fourteen-year-old Lily and her companion, Rosaleen, an African-American woman who has cared from Lily since her mother's death ten years earlier, flee their home after Rosaleen is victimized by racist police officers, and find a safe haven in Tiburon, South Carolina at the home of three beekeeping sisters, May, June, and August.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
by David Wroblewski
Speech-disabled Wisconsin youth Edgar bonds with three yearling canines and struggles to prove that his sinister uncle is responsible for his father's death.
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
The story of a group of American and English expatriates on an excursion from Paris's Left Bank to Pamplona for the July fiesta and its climatic bull fight, a journey from the center of a civilization spiritually bankrupted by the First World War to a vital, God-haunted world in which faith and hnor have yet to lose their currency, the novel captured the spirit of the "Lost Generation."
The Time Traveler’s Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger
Clare and Henry, deeply in love, try desperately to maintain normal lives even though he has been diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition in which his genetic clock periodically resets, pulling him through time to the past or future.
by Harper Lee
Scout's father defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town during the 1930s
by Diane Setterfield
Aging, reclusive author Vida Winter, having given out multiple versions of her life story over the years, decides to finally set the record straight and engages Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter, to write her biography, drawing the young woman into a tale of a governess, a ghost, a willful woman, feral twins, and a gothic mansion
The Traveler
by John Twelve Hawks
Three secret societies, the Travelers, the Harlequins, and the Tabula, head for a showdown when the mercenary Tabula who want to control the world, target Gabriel and Michael Corrigan who may have inherited their Traveler father's gifts as a prophet of wisdom, forcing Maya, a reluctant Harlequin, to take up her duties as sworn protector to the brothers
by Stephanie Meyer
When seventeen-year-old Bella leaves Phoenix to live with her father in Forks, Washington, she meets an exquisitely handsome boy at school for whom she feels an overwhelming attraction and who she comes to realize is not wholly human.
The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
The narrator and his friends try to piece together facts and gossip about a tragic suicide that happened twenty years earlier
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
by Geraldine Brooks
Together in Paris, CIA agent Tommy Carmellini and his boss Jake Grafton work to uncover the French intelligence service's alleged secret agent among Al Queda and the intelligence he or she holds.