Once you let a book into your life, the most unexpected things can happen…
Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her book-loving pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds Amy’s funeral guests just leaving. The residents of Broken Wheel are happy to look after their bewildered visitor—there’s not much else to do in a dying small town that’s almost beyond repair.
You certainly wouldn’t open a bookstore. And definitely not with the tourist in charge. You’d need a vacant storefront (Main Street is full of them),
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National Book Award Nominee
A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, BookPage
1920, Denby, Iowa: Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Frank, into their family farm. He will be the oldest of five. Each chapter in this extraordinary novel covers a single year, encompassing the sweep of history as the Langdons abide by time-honored values and pass them on to their children. With the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change through the early 1950s,
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An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame, and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, from the author of three highly acclaimed previous novels.
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor,
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With its tree-lined streets and curbside planters
brimming with spring bulbs, Amberley,
Massachusetts seems a good place for Cate Saunders
to start over. It’s been two years since her husband,
John, was killed in Iraq, and life has become
something to simply struggle through. Cate’s new
job as a caregiver doesn’t pay much, but the locals
are welcoming. Cate’s barely unpacked before she’s
drawn—reluctantly at first—into a circle of friends.
There’s Gaby, who nourishes her diner customers’ spirits as well as their
bodies;
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In this ‘bewitching supernatural romp,’ (Philadelphia Daily News),
Zelazny created the similar tension between two worlds, the real
and the sinister, as he did in his renown Chronicles of Amber
series. Told from the point of view of Jack the Ripper’s dog Snuff,
each of the 31 chapters in A Night in the Lonesome October is a
diary entry for every night of October. Loyally accompanying a
mysterious knife-wielding gentleman named Jack on his midnight
rounds through the murky streets of London,
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Set against the tumultuous background of apartheid South Africa, a powerful and moving debut about family, sacrifice, and discovering what it means to belong…
Celia Mphephu knows her place in the world. A black servant working in the white suburbs of 1960s Johannesburg, she’s all too aware of her limitations. Nonetheless, she has found herself a comfortable corner: She has a job, can support her faraway family, and is raising her youngest child, Miriam.
But as racial tensions explode, Celia’s world shifts. Her employers decide to flee the political turmoil and move to England—and they ask to adopt Miriam and take her with them.
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