Raymond Chandler

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Pennsylvania

Philip Marlowe, a private eye who operates in Los Angeles's seamy underside during the 1930s, takes on his first case, which involves a paralyzed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail, and murder

The Big Sleep

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Amy Tan

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Kwan, a seventeen-year-old half-sister from China, turns young Olivia's world upside-down with her stories of ghosts of another time, tales that have a profound impact on Olivia's life and imagination, until she discovers a way to reconcile the ghosts ofthe past with her dreams of the future

The Hundred Secret Senses

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Markus Zusak

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

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.

The Book Thief

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Lisa See

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

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.

Shanghai Girls

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Ann Patchett

Struggling with single parenthood and a scandal that cost him his political career, Bernard Doyle fights his disappointment with his adopted sons' career choices before a violent event forces the members of his family to reconsider their priorities. By the author of Bel Canto. 200,000 first printing.

4e3c02af-9a5d-48f4-8c03-624379685708-1

Leo Tolstoy

Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsky

Oversized Paperback (4 to 6 lbs)

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

The must-have Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of one of the greatest Russian novels ever written Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina 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 thereby exposes herself to 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. While previous versions have softened the robust and sometimes shocking qualities of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This authoritative edition, which received the PEN Translation Prize and was an Oprah Book Club™ selection, also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for fans of the film and generations to come. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Anna Karenina

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David Von Drehle

The Fire That Changed America

"Called ""a riveting history written with flair and precision"" by Bob Woodward, Triangle is the dramatic story of the fire that broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City in 1911. Within minutes the flames spread to consume the building's upper three stories. People on the street watched in horror as desperate workers jumped to their deaths. The final toll was 146 people-123 of them women. It chronicles in harrowing detail the fire and gives an insightful look at how this tragedy transformed politics and gave rise to urban liberalism."

Triangle

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Ann Packer

Twenty-three-year-old Carrie Bell feels suffocated and wants to leave her life in Wisconsin, but when her fiancé is paralyzed in a diving accident, she must ask, how much do we owe the people we love? How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? These questions lie at the heart of Ann Packer's intimate and emotionally thrilling new novel, which has won its author comparisons with Jane Hamilton and Sue Miller. At the age of twenty-three Carrie Bell has spent her entire life in Wisconsin, with the same best friend and the same dependable, easygoing, high school sweetheart. Now to her dismay she has begun to find this life suffocating and is considering leaving it-and Mike-behind. But when Mike is paralyzed in a diving accident, leaving seems unforgivable and yet more necessary than ever. The Dive from Clausen's Pier animates this dilemma-and Carrie's startling response to it-with the narrative assurance, exacting realism, and moral complexity we expect from the very best fiction.

The Dive from Clausen's Pier

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Jhumpa Lahiri

Exploring the secrets and complexities lying at the heart of family life and relationships, a collection of eight stories includes the title work, about a young mother in a new city whose father tends her garden while hiding a secret love affair, as well as "Hema and Kaushik," "Only Goodness," and "A Choice of Accommodations," among others. 300,000 first printing.

Unaccustomed Earth

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David Laskin

"David Laskin deploys historical fact of the finest grain to tell the story of a monstrous blizzard that caught the settlers of the Great Plains utterly by surprise. . . . This is a book best read with a fire roaring in the hearth and a blanket and box of tissues near at hand."  -- Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City

"Heartbreaking. . . . This account of the 1888 blizzard reads like a thriller."  -- Entertainment Weekly



The gripping true story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier.

January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next the sky exploded in a raging chaos of horizontal snow and hurricane-force winds. Temperatures plunged as an unprecedented cold front ripped through the center of the continent.

By the next morning, some five hundred people lay dead on the drifted prairie, many of them children who had perished on their way home from country schools. In a few terrifying hours, the hopes of the pioneers had been blasted by the bitter realities of their harsh environment. Recent immigrants from Germany, Norway, Denmark, and the Ukraine learned that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled.

With the storm as its dramatic, heartbreaking focal point, The Children's Blizzard captures this pivotal moment in American history by tracing the stories of five families who were forever changed that day. David Laskin has produced a masterful portrait of a tragic crucible in the settlement of the American heartland.

The P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

The Children's Blizzard

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Alexander McCall Smith

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

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Worrying about her upcoming marriage, Precious Ramotswe is confronted by the challenges of running her No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and an investigation into the would-be suitors of a wealthy woman to determine if any are fortune hunters.

The Full Cupboard of Life

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David McCullough

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling biography of America’s founding father and second president that was the basis for the acclaimed HBO series, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough. In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second president of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by some as “out of his senses”; and whose marriage to the wise and valiant Abigail Adams is one of the moving love stories in American history. This is history on a grand scale—a book about politics and war and social issues, but also about human nature, love, religious faith, virtue, ambition, friendship, and betrayal, and the far-reaching consequences of noble ideas. Above all, John Adams is an enthralling, often surprising story of one of the most important and fascinating Americans who ever lived.

John Adams

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P.I. Precious Ramotswe comes face to face with a cobra, investigates a swindling doctor, and discovers that Aunty Emang isn't what she seems to.

Blue Shoes and Happiness

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Thomas Moran

A psychic love story between a brain-damaged New York policeman on life support and his hospital nurse. The romance is all in his head, until the day she feels his presence in her apartment.

The World I Made for Her

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Norman Mailer

A Novel

The final work of fiction from Norman Mailer, a defining voice of the postwar era, is also one of his most ambitious, taking as its subject the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man in possession of extraordinary secrets, follows Adolf from birth through adolescence and offers revealing portraits of Hitler's parents and siblings. A crucial reflection on the shadows that eclipsed the twentieth century, Mailer's novel delivers myriad twists and surprises along with characteristically astonishing insights into the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all.
 
Praise for The Castle in the Forest
 
"This remarkable novel about the young Adolf Hitler, his family and their shifting circumstances, is Mailer's most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien. . . . Mailer doesn't inhabit these historical figures so much as possess them."--The New York Times Book Review
 
"Terrifically creepy . . . an icy and convincing portrait of the dictator as a young sociopath."--Entertainment Weekly
 
"The work of a bold and confident writer who may yet be seen as the preeminent novelist of our time . . . a source of tremendous narrative pleasure . . . Every character . . . lives and breathes."--South Florida Sun-Sentinel
 
"Blackly hilarious, beautifully written . . . [The Castle in the Forest] has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit."--The New York Observer
 
Praise for Norman Mailer
 
"[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation."--The New York Times
 
"A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent."--The New Yorker
 
"Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure."--The Washington Post
 
"A devastatingly alive and original creative mind."--Life
 
"Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance."--The New York Review of Books
 
"The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book."--Chicago Tribune
 
"Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream."--The Cincinnati Post

The Castle in the Forest

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Brian Doherty

Doherty provides detailed information on the outrageous festival---its inception, history, growth, and players--for the hundreds of thousands who have attended, as well as those who only wish they had.

This Is Burning Man

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Doris Kearns Goodwin

In Turbulent Times

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “After five decades of magisterial output, Doris Kearns Goodwin leads the league of presidential historians. Insight is her imprint.”—USA TODAY “A book like Leadership should help us raise our expectations of our national leaders, our country and ourselves.”—The Washington Post “We can only hope that a few of Goodwin’s many readers will find in her subjects’ examples a margin of inspiration and a resolve to steer the country to a better place.”—The New York Times Book Review In this culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration of the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership. Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader? In Leadership, Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope. Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times. No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these men shared a fierce ambition and a deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon hardships. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others. This seminal work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today’s polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency.

Leadership

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A Chinese immigrant who is convinced she is dying threatens to celebrate the Chinese New Year by unburdening herself of everybody's hidden truths, thus prompting a series of comic misunderstandings

The Kitchen God's Wife

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Evan Osnos

New except for a scuff on the bottom of the spine 

The Making of America's Fury

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

After a decade abroad, the National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Evan Osnos returns to three places he has lived in the United States--Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL--to illuminate the origins of America's political fury.

Evan Osnos moved to Washington, D.C., in 2013 after a decade away from the United States, first reporting from the Middle East before becoming the Beijing bureau chief at the Chicago Tribune and then the China correspondent for The New Yorker. While abroad, he often found himself making a case for America, urging the citizens of Egypt, Iraq, or China to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments: the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity for all. But when he returned to the United States, he found each of these principles under assault.

In search of an explanation for the crisis that reached an unsettling crescendo in 2020--a year of pandemic, civil unrest, and political turmoil--he focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America's political dissolution. He finds answers in the rightward shift of the financial elite in Greenwich, in the collapse of social infrastructure and possibility in Clarksburg, and in the compounded effects of segregation and violence in Chicago. The truth about the state of the nation may be found not in the slogans of political leaders but in the intricate details of individual lives, and in the hidden connections between them. As Wildland weaves in and out of these personal stories, events in Washington occasionally intrude, like flames licking up on the horizon.

A dramatic, prescient examination of seismic changes in American politics and culture, Wildland is the story of a crucible, a period bounded by two shocks to America's psyche, two assaults on the country's sense of itself: the attacks of September 11 in 2001 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Following the lives of everyday Americans in three cities and across two decades, Osnos illuminates the country in a startling light, revealing how we lost the moral confidence to see ourselves as larger than the sum of our parts.

Wildland

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Diane Ackerman

A War Story

Documents the heroic true story of Warsaw Zoo keepers and resistance activists Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who in the aftermath of Germany's invasion of Poland saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish citizens by smuggling them into empty cages and their home villa. 70,000 first printing.

The Zookeeper's Wife

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THE NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY - Book 6 Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, the basis of the HBO TV show, and its proprietor Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, and good humor--not to mention help from her loyal assistant, Grace Makutsi, and the occasional cup of tea. In the newest addition to the universally beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, the charming and ever-resourceful Precious Ramotswe finds herself overly beset by problems. She is already busier than usual at the detective agency when added to her concerns are a strange intruder in her house on Zebra Drive and the baffling appearance of a pumpkin. And then there is Mma Makutsi, who decides to treat herself to dance lessons, only to be partnered with a man who seems to have two left feet. Nor are things running quite as smoothly as they usually do at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. Mma Ramotswe's husband, the estimable Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, is overburdened with work even before one of his apprentices runs off with a wealthy woman. But what finally rattles Mma Ramotswe's normally unshakable composure is a visitor who forces her to confront a secret from her past. . . . All this unfolds against the sunlit background of Mma Ramotswe's beloved homeland, Botswana-a land of empty spaces, echoing skies, and an endless supply of soothing bush tea.

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

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THE NO. 1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY.
FOR ALL CONFIDENTIAL MATTERS AND ENQUIRIES. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED FOR ALL PARTIES.
UNDER PERSONAL MANAGEMENT.

A beguiling mystery and lyrical novel of Africa -- the fourth in a series that the L.A. Times calls "thoroughly engaging and entertaining."

Now that The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (the only detective agency for ladies and others in Botswana) is established, its founder, Precious Ramotswe, can look upon her life with pride: she's reached her late thirties ("the finest age to be"), has a house, two children, a good fianc#65533; -- Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni -- and many satisfied customers. But life is never without its problems. It turns out that her adopted son is responsible for the dead hoopoe bird in the garden; her assistant, Mma Makutsi, wants a husband and needs help with her idea to open the Kalahari Typing School for Men; yet Mma Ramotswe's sexist rival has no trouble opening his Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency across town. Will Precious Ramotswe's delightfully cunning and profoundly moral methods save the day? Follow the continuing story of Botswana's first lady detective in the irresistible The Kalahari Typing School for Men.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

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Struggling to regain her voice and express her true feelings to her husband, ghostwriter Ruth Young discovers that her inability to speak closely parallels the story of her mother LuLing's early life in China, where Ruth finds the famous bonesetter, a woman whose mouth was sealed shut during a suicide attempt.

Browse by categories

Raymond Chandler

The Big Sleep

Amy Tan

The Hundred Secret Senses

Markus Zusak

The Book Thief

Lisa See

Shanghai Girls

Ann Patchett

Run

Leo Tolstoy; Richard Pevear; Larissa Volokhonsky

Anna Karenina

David Von Drehle

Triangle

Ann Packer

The Dive from Clausen's Pier

Jhumpa Lahiri

Unaccustomed Earth

David Laskin

The Children's Blizzard

Alexander McCall Smith

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

Alexander McCall Smith

The Full Cupboard of Life

David McCullough

John Adams

Alexander McCall Smith

Blue Shoes and Happiness

Thomas Moran

The World I Made for Her

Norman Mailer

The Castle in the Forest

Brian Doherty

This Is Burning Man

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Leadership

Amy Tan

The Kitchen God's Wife

Evan Osnos

Wildland

Diane Ackerman

The Zookeeper's Wife

Alexander McCall Smith

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Alexander McCall Smith

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

Amy Tan

The Bonesetter's Daughter

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