By David Ebershoff

Intertwining tale of a 20th–century murder mystery in Utah and a women 18th century attempts to rid America of polygamy.

By Wallace Stegner
With Lisa Caputo, Assistant Library Director

Tuesday, May 24, 2011. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.

Retirees Joseph and Ruth Allston find their placid, rural California life disrupted by a hippie who builds a treehouse on their property and by a young married couple tragically affected by pregnancy and cancer.

By Jeanette Atkins

The story, told in poetry, about the relationships between three extraordinary mothers (Laura Ingalls wilder, Marie Curie and Sarah Breedlove) and their daughters.

By Elle Feldman

Peter Van Pels hid in the attic with Anne Frank and died in the camps just before liberation. This novel attempts to answer the question: What if he survived, forged a new identity, and came to the U.S. after the war?

By Aldous Huxley
With Lisa Caputo, Assistant Library Director

Tuesday, February 28, 2012. 1 PM & 7:30 PM.

The story of a futuristic World State where all emotion, love, art, and human individuality have been replaced by social stability.

Became the movie: Brave New World.

By Stephanie Kallos
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Clare Badke, Principal Account Clerk, Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director, Adrienne Rein, Library Clerk

When elderly Margaret Hughes discovers that she has a malignant brain tumor, she refuses treatment and decides to take a nice young tenant into her huge, lonely Seattle mansion for company.

By Colm Toibin
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, May 25, 2010.  1 PM & 7:30 PM.

A diligent young woman with few opportunities in nineteen–fifties Ireland is packed off by her family to Brooklyn, where she encounters new and bewildering experiences before a family crisis presents her with a stark choice between her new life and her old one.

By Beverly Swerling
Series City of Four

The early history of Manhattan is chronicled through six generations of a remarkable clan of surgeons, physicians, and apothecaries.

By Beverly Swerling
Series City of Four

This sequel to City of Dreams continues tracing the physical, social, and moral development of Manhattan through the stories of the fictional Turner and Devrey families.

By Beverly Swerling
Series City of Four

The third in the historical series (after City of Glory) about the Turner and Devrey families and the growth of New York City takes place in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

By Richard Russo

Milo Roby tries to hold his family together while working at the Empire Grill in the once–successful logging town of Empire Falls, Maine, with his partner, Mrs. Whiting, who is the heir to a faded logging and textile legacy.

By Pam Munoz Ryan

Esperanza's expectation that her 13th birthday will be celebrated with all the material pleasures and folk elements of her previous years is shattered when her father is murdered by bandits.

By Barbara Delinsky

Elizabeth Clarke, a beautiful daughter born to Hugh and Dana, possesses definite African American traits, leaving the parents puzzled and the extended Clarke family scandalized.

By Kristin Hannah
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

An exploration of the complicated terrain between best friends - one who chooses marriage and motherhood while the other opts for career and celebrity. 

By H.G. Bissinger
Recommended By Kalpana Mehta, Reference Librarian

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bissinger tells of the year he spent 1988 in Odessa, Tex., a town obsessed with its champion high–school football team, the Permian Panthers.

Became the movie: Friday Night Lights and TV show: Friday Night Lights.

By Sarah Addison Allen

In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. This is the story of that enchanted tree, and the extraordinary people who tend it.

By Jean Kwok
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

A resolute yet naïve Chinese girl confronts poverty and culture shock with equal zeal when she and her mother immigrate to Brooklyn.

By Sarah Addison Allen

In a quirky little Southern town with more magic than a full Carolina moon, two women discover how to find their place in the world–no matter how out of place they feel.

By Lois Lowry

Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.

Became the movie: The Giver (2014)

By Margaret Atwood
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist, Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian

A look at the near future presents the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they are viable for reproduction.

By Alan Brennert
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Chronicles the lives of Asian immigrants in and around Hawaii's early 20th-century glamor days.

By Per Petterson

In 1989, 37–year–old Arvid Jansen's marriage is ending and his mother is dying of cancer. Hoping to leave his marital woes behind in Oslo, Jansen follows his Danish–born mother to her home country, to the beach house where the family spent summers.

By Wally Lamb

Narrator Dominick Birdsey, once a high–school history teacher and now, at 40, a housepainter in upstate Connecticut, relates the process that led to his twin Thomas's schizophrenic paranoia and the resulting chaos in both their lives.

By Richard North Patterson

In this thriller, military lawyer Paul Terry takes on the case of a young lieutenant accused of fatally shooting his commanding officer with the man’s own gun.

By Brunonia Barry
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

Towner Whitney, a dazed young woman descended from a long line of mind readers and fortune tellers, has survived numerous traumas and returned to her hometown of Salem, Mass., to recover.

By Anton Chekov

In this short story a forty year old married man on a ship for a business trip, meets a married woman also traveling alone.

By Elle Feldman

Recreation of FDR's love affair with his wife's social secretary, Lucy Mercer Rutherford.

By Jeffrey Eugenides
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41–year–old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this mesmerizing saga of a near–mythic Greek American family.

By Alan Brennert
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

Tracks the poignant struggle of a Hawaiian woman who contracts leprosy as a child in Honolulu during the 1890s and is deported to the island of Moloka'i, where she grows to adulthood at the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa.

By Hillary Jordan

In 1946, Laura McAllan tries to adjust after moving with her husband and two children to an isolated cotton farm in the Mississipi Delta.

By Kazuo Ishiguro
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Monday, March 5, 2012. 7 PM

The students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them. Only, slowly, do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny.

By Lois Lowry

In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten–year–old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

By David Nicholls

An episodic story which takes place during a single day each year for two decades in the lives of Dex and Em, who met the day they graduated from university in 1988.

Became the movie: One Day.

By Tova Mirvis

A story that delves into the lives of two families, each struggling with its own insecurities and difficulties within the oft neglected and misunderstood worlds of ultra–Orthodox and Modern Orthodox Judaism.

By Claire Cook

Frustrated by domesticity, Beth a wife and mother of three, finds a secret way to make her life exciting.

By Mohsin Hamid

In the aftermath of 9/11 a young Pakistani man tells his life story to a mysterious American stranger.

Became the movie: The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

By Gail Tsukiyama
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, January 26, 2010.  1 PM & 7:30 PM.

Set in Japan just before WWII, the novel tells of a young Chinese man's encounters with four locals while he recuperates from tuberculosis.

By Tatiana de Rosnay
Recommended By Susan L., Library Page

American Journalist Julia Jarmond researches the brutal 1942 Nazi roundup in Paris and stumbles upon a connection between her family and one of the victims, which compels Julia to learn more about the girl's life.

By Wally Lamb

The troubled product of a stormy marriage, Dolores Price, recounts her life story from age four to age 40.

By Mark Haddon

Recent retiree George Hall, convinced that his eczema is cancer, goes into a tailspin in this laugh–out–loud slice of British domestic life.

By Jennifer Donnolly
Series Tea Rose Trilogy

London, 1888: a young woman dares to dream of a life beyond tumbledown wharves, gas lit alleys and the grim, crumbling dwellings of the poor.

By John Updike

The story of Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an alienated American–born teenager who spurns the materialistic, hedonistic life he witnesses in the slumping New Jersey factory town he calls home.

By Ninni Holmqvist

This novel, set in a dystopia in a near future, is about  people who don’t have any children or anyone else who loves them or needs them.

By Sharon Creech

While Sal, a thirteen year old girl whose mother has left home, accompanies her eccentric grandparents on a six–day drive to Idaho to retrace her mother's route, she entertains them with the tale of Phoebe, whose mother has also left home.

By Kristen Hannah
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

A family drama ignited by the death of a loving father whose two daughters have grown apart from each other and from their acid-tongued, Russian-born mother.

By Jennifer Donnolly
Series Tea Rose Trilogy

Idealistic new medical school graduate India Selwyn Jones goes to work at a clinic in the city's poorest neighborhood, much to the dismay of her aristocratic mother and ambitious fianc

By Margaret Atwood

The novel begins as the earth is going through catastrophic climate change and then tracks back in time over the corrupt and degenerate world that preceded it.