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Authors O - Z

Otsuka, Julie.When the Emperor Was Divine. (10 Copies)

On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her house, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family’s possessions. Like thousands of other Japaanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert. Julei Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience, the unheralded feats of heroism, When the Emperor was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today’s headlines. –Book Jacket

Pagnamenta, Peter. Sword and Blossom. (10 Copies)

Sword and Blossom tells the tragic true story of an extraordinary love affair that began when a young Army officer fell in love with a Japanese woman in the early years of the twentieth century. Based on a treasure trove of more than eight hundred letters, it chronicles Arthur Hart- Synnot and Masa Suzuki's attempts to make a life together despite long periods of separation, racial prejudice, and political turbulence. Their doomed relationship, like that of their countries, was part of a confused age of extremes and contradictions, of violence and beauty, and of destinies etched out amid the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto. (10 Copies)

Opera and terrorism make strange bedfellows, yet in this novel they complement each other nicely. At a birthday party for Japanese industrialist Mr. Hosokawa somewhere in South America, famous American soprano Roxanne Coss is just finishing her recital in the Vice President's home when armed terrorists appear, intending to take the President hostage. However, he is not there, so instead they hold the international businesspeople and diplomats at the party, releasing all the women except Roxanne. Captors and their prisoners settle into a strange domesticity, with the opera diva captivating them all as she does her daily practicing. Soon romantic liaisons develop with the hopeless intensity found in many opera plots.-Book Jacket

P earl, Matthew. The Dante Club. (10 Copies)

In 1865 Boston, the members of the Dante Club -- poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J.T. Fields -- are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions onto American bookshelves will prove as corrupting as the immigrants living in Boston Harbor.

As they struggle to keep their sacred literary cause alive, the plans of the Dante Club are put in further jeopardy when a serial killer unleashes his terror on the city. Only the scholars realize that the gruesome murders are modeled on the descriptions from Dante's Inferno and its account of Hell's torturous punishments. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret. The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante, his mythic genius, and his continued grip on our imaginations.-Book Jacket

Picoult, Jodi. Change of Heart. (10 Copies)

One moment June Nealon was happily looking forward to years full of laughter and adventure with her family, and the next, she was staring into a future that was as empty as her heart. Now her life is a waiting game. Waiting for time to heal her wounds, waiting for justice. In short, waiting for a miracle to happen. For Shay Bourne, life holds no more surprises. The world has given him nothing, and he has nothing to offer the world. In a heartbeat, though, something happens that changes everything for him. Now, he has one last chance for salvation, and it lies with June's eleven-year-old daughter, Claire. But between Shay and Claire stretches an ocean of bitter regrets, past crimes, and the rage of a mother who has lost her child. Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy's dying wish? Once again, Jodi Picoult mesmerizes and enthralls readers with this story of redemption, justice, and love. –Book Jacket

Picoult, Jodi. Nineteen Minutes . (10 Copies)

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five....In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it. In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge. Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens — until the day its complacency is shattered by a shocking act of violence. In the aftermath, the town's residents must not only seek justice in order to begin healing but also come to terms with the role they played in the tragedy. –Book Jacket

Pressfield, Steven. Gates of fire. (10 copies)

Ten years after his father Darius the Great was defeated at Marathon, Xerxes returned to conquer and punish Greece with a huge and terrible army. Between them and the Greek mainland lay the narrow pass of Thermopylae, defended by a small contingent of citizen-soldiers, and ultimately held by a picked force of just three hundred Spartan warriors. This is the moving story of those heroic brothers-in-arms who bought precious time for Western Civilization with their lives; a stirring tale of guts and glory, blood, brawn, and bone-jarring combat as wave after wave of Persian attackers crash on the mighty shore of Spartan shields. –Book Jacket

Reiken, Frederick. The Lost Legends of New Jersey. (10 Copies)

Romeo and Juliet in northern New Jersey? Yiddish constellations in Asbury Park? A garbage dump in the Meadowlands that's filled with old musical instruments from a high school marching band? Love and sex, hockey and snorkeling, a family that is falling apart despite the best intentions-this is what Frederick Reiken has delivered in his brilliant second novel.-Book Jacket

Rosenberg, Liz. Home Repair. (10 Copies)

Can lighting really strike twice? Just ask Eve, whose husband walks out on her in the middle of a garage sale.

Eve's beloved Ivan died thirteen years ago in an automobile accident. Her charming, boyish Chuck has taken a different exit out of her life: hopping into his car in the middle of a garage sale with no forewarning and departing their formerly happy upstate New York home for points unknown. Now Eve's a boat adrift, subsisting on a heartbreak diet of rue, disappointment, and woe-left alone to care for Ivan's brilliant teenaged son, Marcus, and Chuck's precocious, pragmatic nine-year-old daughter, Noni, while contending with Charlotte, Eve's acerbic mother, who's come north to "help" but hinders instead.

But life ultimately must go on, with its highs and lows, its traumas and holidays, and well-meaning, if eccentric, friends. A house and a heart in disrepair are painful burdens for a passionate woman who's still in her prime. And while learning to cope with the large and small tragedies that each passing day brings, Eve might end up discovering that she's gained much more than she's lost. –Book Jacket

Rosnay, Tatiana. Sarah’s Key. (10 Copies)

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.
Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.-Book Jacket

Roth, Philip. American Pastoral . (10 Copies)

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century’s promises of prosperity, civil order, and domestic bliss. Roth’s protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wretched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. - Book Jacket

Russo, Richard. Empire Falls . (10 Copies)

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 hight school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Miles’s soon-to-be-es-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. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace.- Book Jacket

Seierstad, Asne. The Bookseller of Kabul. (10 Copies)

With The Bookseller of Kabul, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad has given readers a first-hand look at Afghani life as few outsiders have seen it. Invited to live with Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul, and his family for months, this account of her experience allows the Khans to speak for themselves, giving us a genuinely gripping and moving portrait of a family, and of a country of great cultural riches and extreme contradictions.

For more than 20 years, Sultan Khan has defied the authorities—whether Communist or Taliban—to supply books to the people of Kabul. He has been arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned, and has watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. Yet he had persisted in his passion for books, shedding light in one of the world's darkest places.

This is the intimate portrait of a man of principle and of his family—two wives, five children, and many relatives sharing a small four-room house in this war ravaged city. But more than that, it is a rare look at contemporary life under Islam, where even after the Taliban's collapse, the women must submit to arranged marriages, polygamous husbands, and crippling limitations on their ability to travel, learn and communicate with others.-Book Jacket

Setterfield, Diane. The Thirteenth Tale. (10 Copies)

When Margaret Lea opened the door to the past, what she confronted was her destiny.All children mythologize their birth. . . . So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's beloved collection of stories, long famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale. The enigmatic Winter has always kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she summons a biographer to tell the truth about her extraordinary life: Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth remains an ever-present pain. Disinterring the life she meant to bury for good, Vida mesmerizes Margaret with the power of her storytelling. Hers is a tale of gothic strangeness, featuring the Angelfield family -- including the beautiful and willful Isabelle, and the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline -- a ghost, a governess, and a devastating fire. Struck by a curious parallel between their stories, Margaret demands the truth from Vida, and together they confront the ghosts that have haunted them.-Book Jacket

Shapiro, Dani. Familiy History. (10 Copies)

Rachel Jensen is perfectly happy; in love with her husband, devoted to their daughter Kate, gratified by her work restoring art. And finally, she’s pregnant again, But as Rachel discovers, perfection can unravel in an instant. The summer she is thirtee, Kate returns from camp sullen, angry, and withdrawn. Everyone assures Rachel it’s typical adolescent angst. But then Kate has a terrifying accident with her infant brother, and the ensuing guilt brings forth a dreadful lie-one that ruptures their family, perhaps irrevocably. Family History is a mesmerizing journey through the mysteries of ado lescent pain and family crisis.-Book Jacket

Sittenfeld, Curtis. American Wife. (10 Copies)

A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice Lindgren has no idea that she will one day end up in the White House, married to the president. In her small Wisconsin hometown, she learns the virtues of politeness, but a tragic accident when she is seventeen shatters her identity and changes the trajectory of her life. More than a decade later, when the charismatic son of a powerful Republican family sweeps her off her feet, she is surprised to find herself admitted into a world of privilege. And when her husband unexpectedly becomes governor and then president, she discovers that she is married to a man she both loves and fundamentally disagrees with–and that her private beliefs increasingly run against her public persona. As her husband’s presidency enters its second term, Alice must confront contradictions years in the making and face questions nearly impossible to answer.

Smith, Zadie. On Beauty. (10 Copies)

Just outside of Boston, in the small college town of Wellington, lives a family that is anything but typical. Liberated by education, complicated by race, and hobbled by self-delusion, they are about to stray onto the battlegraound that divides personal belief from political conviction. On Beauty is Zadie Smith’s brilliant, hilarious send-up of the culture wars that define our age. –Book Jacket

Stegner, Wallace. Crossing to Safety . (10 Copies)

Two young couples, Sid and Charity and Larry and Sally, from different backgrounds--East and West, rich and poor--befriend each other in 1937 Madison, Wisconsin.

Crossing to Safety is a novel about gifts: the gifts of our talents; the gifts of our shortcomings, which allow us to grow; the gifts of a marriage; the gifts of our friendships; the gifts of what endures and what falls away; the gift of a good life and the gift of a good death.—Terry Tempest Willams

Strout, Elizabeth . Amy and Isabelle . (10 Copies)

Isabelle Goodrow thought her move to the small mill town of Shirley Falls would be temporary-just until she decided in which direction she wanted her life to head. Now her daughter, Amy, has fallen in love with her high school math teacher, and he takes advantage of the teen's infatuation. When the relationship is discovered, Isabelle is furious with her daughter but also a little jealous that Amy has found sexual fulfillment while she has not. As mother and daughter try to rebuild the trust and closeness they once shared, the private secrets of many citizens of Shirley Falls are revealed.-Book jacket

Strout, Elizabeth . Olive Kitteridge. (10 Copies)

2009 Pulitzer Prize winner in the Letters, Drama and Music category.

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life – sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition - its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.-Book Jacket

Winston, Lolly. Happiness Sold Separately. (10 Copies)

Elinor Mackey has always done the right things in the right order-college, law school, career, marriage-but now everything's going wrong. After two painful years of trying, Elinor has learned that she can't have children. All the doctors can tell her is that it's probably because of her age. As she turns forty, she withdraws into an interior world of heartbreak.
Elinor's loving husband, Ted, a successful podiatrist, has always done the right thing, too. Then he meets the wrong woman at the wrong time, and does the wrong thing. Ted's lover, Gina-a beautiful and kindhearted nutritionist-always eats the right thing, but is unlucky in love and always falls for the wrong men. Soon Ted has to fight to make everything right again.
Can Elinor and Ted's marriage be saved? The answer is alarmingly fresh and unexpected as New York Times bestselling author Lolly Winston introduces us to characters as memorable as those of Anne Tyler and Nick Hornby, but who are indelibly all her own.-Book Jacket

Wolf, Tobias. This Boy’s Life. (10 Copies)

This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move, yet they develop an extraordinarily close, almost telepathic relationship. As Toby fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff does a masterful job of re-creating the frustrations and cruelties of adolescence. His various schemes - running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars - lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility . – Book Jacket

Wolitzer, Meg. The Ten Year Nap. (10 Copies)

For a group of four New York friends the past decade has been defined largely by marriage and motherhood, but it wasn't always that way. Growing up, they had been told that their generation would be different. And for a while this was true. They went to good colleges, and began high-powered careers. But after marriage and babies, for a variety of reasons, they decided to stay home, temporarily, to raise their children. Now, ten years later, they are still at home, unsure how they came to inhabit lives so different from the ones they expected-until a new series of events begins to change the landscape of their lives yet again, in ways they couldn't have predicted .- Book Jacket

Wolitzer, Meg. The Wife. (10 Copies)

On the way to a big literary-award ceremony, the wife of a famous New York Jewish novelist—sick of his philandering, his self-importance, and his limited talent—decides on divorce. Her stingingly comic story of their marriage shows why. They met in 1956, when she was his writing student at Smith and he was the author of one very bad published story. Only after running off with his talented and self-effacing pupil does he burst into literary stardom. Although they have three (variously unhappy) children, he has always been the real child in the family, dragging her along to the fêtes at which he is flattered and flirted with while she drinks her jealousy away.

Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. (10 Copies)

In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be a model couple: bright, beautiful, and talented, with two young children and a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now, that certainty is about to crumble. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.-Book Jacket