By Janice Hallett
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian
When the cast of a local theater group raises money for an experimental treatment for the director’s granddaughter, who has a rare form of cancer, one member raises her concerns, creating tensions within the community, which leads to murder.
By Rainbow Rowell
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist
With Stacey Mencher, Readers' Services Librarian
Gossiping and sharing their personal secrets on e-mail in spite of their company's online monitoring practices, Beth and Jennifer unwittingly amuse Internet security officer Lincoln, who unexpectedly falls for Beth.
By Helen Fielding
Recommended By Megan Kass, Systems Manager
The daily chronicle of a 30-something single English woman who is convinced her life would be perfect if she could lose weight, stop smoking and develop "Inner Poise."
By Helen Fielding
Series Bridget Jones
Bridget’s new relationship with Mark Darcy should have improved her self-confidence, but the difficult adjustments of sharing an apartment and Rebecca’s eagerness to cause trouble are making Bridget more uncertain than ever.
By Bernie McGill
A proud, uncompromising woman, Harriet's great passion is collecting butterflies and pinning them under glass; motherhood comes no easier to her than her role as mistress of her remote Irish estate. When her daughter dies, her community is quick to judgeher, and Harriet will not stoop to defend herself. But her journals reveal a more complex truth.
By Alice Walker
Two African American sisters, one a missionary in Africa and the other a child-wife living in the South, support each other through their correspondence, beginning in the 1920s.
By Bram Stoker
Having discovered the double identity of the wealthy Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula, a small group of people vow to rid the world of the evil vampire.
By Mark Dunn
Recounts what happens when the citizens of an island must rely on all their ingenuity to communicate in an increasingly limited language when the goverment progressively bans letters from the alphabet.
A Cambridge professor, scholar and researcher on the study of faeries visits the hardscrabble village of Hransvik where she gets closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones and resists her insufferably handsome academic rival.
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian
“This highly imaginative debut novel features a protagonist with the same name as the author… His mission, as he ventures through the farmlands, is to find Augustine, who may have saved the grandfather he never knew from the Nazis (Library Journal).”
By Marilynne Robinson
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian
As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.
As London is emerging from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton discovers her next subject in a book club on Guernsey - a club born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi after its members are discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.
By Michelle Markowitz
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager
Based on the column of the same name that appeared in The Toast, Hey Ladies! is a laugh-out-loud read that follows a fictitious group of eight 20-and-30-something female friends for one year of holidays, summer house rentals, dates, brunches, breakups, and, of course, the planning of a disastrous wedding. This instantly relatable story is told entirely through emails, texts, DMs, and every other form of communication known to man. The women in the book are stand-ins for annoying friends that we all have. There's Nicole, who's always broke and tries to pay for things in Forever21 gift cards. There's Katie, the self-important budding journalist, who thinks a retweet and a byline are the same thing. And there's Jen, the DIY suburban bride-to-be. With a perfectly pitched sardonic tone, Hey Ladies! will have you cringing and laughing as you recognize your own friends, and even yourself.
By Holly Denham
Series Holly's Inbox Series
Holly Denham has a lot on her plate. It’s her first day as a receptionist at a busy London corporate bank and, frankly, she can’t quite keep up. Take a peek at her email and you’ll see why: what with her crazy friends, dysfunctional family, and gossipy co-workers, Holly’s inbox is a daily source of drama. But it’s the laughter, friendship, and a hint of romance that keep Holly going.
By Tatiana de Rosnay
Determined to protect her historical family home from Emperor Napoleon's orders to renovate 1860s Paris, Rose Bazelet establishes a defense in the basement of her house on rue Childebert and records her experiences in letters to her late husband.
By Dodie Smith
Recommended By Jessikah Chautin, Community Engagement Specialist
The 1934 journal of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain reveals her perspective on six stormy months in the eccentric and poverty-stricken life of her family in a ruined Suffolk castle, ending with the revelation that Cassandra is deeply in love.
Became the movie: I Capture the Castle.
By Nick Hornby
Ending her relationship with a man who turns out to be in love with a reclusive singer, Annie initiates an e-mail friendship with the musician that reveals their mutual loneliness, his concerns about his young son, and his plans to release an acoustic version of his most successful album.
By Barbara Kingsolver
Harrison William Shepherd, a highly observant writer, is caught between two worlds--in Mexico, working for communists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, and later in America, where he is caught up in the patriotism of World War II.
By Herman Wouk
A tale told through correspondence, articles, and text messages traces the efforts of a group of movie makers, including a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father's strict upbringing, to create a movie about the life of Moses.
By Ava Dellaira
A troubled teen writes poignant letters to influential celebrities who died young, confronting in the process her own efforts to fit in, navigate her splintering family and come to terms with a past trauma.
In a story inspired by the father character in "Little Women" and drawn from the journals and letters of Louisa May Alcott's father, a man leaves behind his family to serve in the Civil War and finds his beliefs challenged by his experiences.
By Isabel Allende
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk
Maya, a young American on the run, is sent to Chiloé, in a remote part of Chile, her grandmother’s homeland, where she records in her diary her adjustment to a new country, her drug problems, her romantic life, and other developments.
By Alice Youngson
Recommended By Sue Ann R., Head of Children's Services, Donna Burger, Readers' Services Librarian
A professor in Denmark and a grandmother in England begin a correspondence, and a friendship, that develops into something extraordinary.
By Katarina Bivald
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk, Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager, Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian
A Swedish tourist opens a bookstore in Broken Wheel, Iowa, to honor her deceased pen pal and makes some unconventional choices that threaten to bring long-hidden secrets to light as she attempts to share her love of reading with the locals.
By Susan Rivers
With Jean Simpson, Readers' Services Librarian
Follows the efforts of Civil War veteran Major Gryffth Hockaday to discern the truth about his teen bride, who during the two years he was at war was convicted and imprisoned for allegedly having a baby in his absence and killing it.
By Stephanie Butland
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation
After her husband, Michael, tragically drowns and rumors start to swirl about him, Elizabeth Gray is left to sort through her feelings and the new information about her husband’s actions leading up to his untimely death.
By Richard Paul Evans
Series Christmas Box Trilogy
Recommended By Nancy Lowenstein, Library Page
"Follows the love story of MaryAnne and David Parkin as they struggle with the lessons of love, loyalty, and forgiveness and cope with tragedy, in a story about the gifts we pass on to our children (From the Publisher)."
By Richard Paul Evans
Recommended By Nancy Lowenstein, Library Page
When his partner betrays him and his wife dies, an inconsolable Alan Christoffersen leaves most of his worldly possessions behind and sets off on a soul searching journey from Washington to Florida.
By Lionel Shriver
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk
Eva never really wanted to be a mother - and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklyn. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.
By Aravind Adiga
Recommended By Lakshmi Kasturi, Library Clerk, Neela Vass, Head of Acquisitions
Relocating to New Delhi when he is offered a new job, Balram Halwai is disillusioned by the city's twenty-first-century materialism and technology-spawned violence, a circumstance that forces him to question his loyalties, ambitions, and past.
By Jennifer Cody Epstein
A German–American woman in 1989 New York City evaluates her relationship with her late mother, whose childhood best friendship was shattered in the wake of a betrayal involving the Hitler Youth movement and a family secret.