If You Like: Literary Fiction
2017 Titles
Allie and Bea by
An Amazon Charts bestseller. Bea has barely been scraping by since her husband died. After falling for a telephone scam, she loses everything and is forced to abandon her trailer. With only two-thirds of a tank in her old van, she heads toward the Pacific Ocean with her cat--on a mission to reclaim what's rightfully hers, even if it means making others pay for what she lost. When fifteen-year-old Allie's parents are jailed for tax fraud, she's sent to a group home. But when her life is threatened by another resident, she knows she has to get out. She escapes only to find she has nowhere to go--until fate throws Allie in Bea's path. Reluctant to trust each other, much less become friends, the two warily make their way up the Pacific Coast. Yet as their hearts open to friendship and love from the strangers they meet on their journey, they find the courage to forge their own unique family--and begin to see an imperfect world with new eyes.
Call Number: HYDISBN: 9781477819715Publication Date: 2017-05-23
The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories by Call Number: LIVISBN: 9780735222038Publication Date: 2017-05-09
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2017 Titles
The Women in the Castle by
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Moving . . . surprises and devastates."—New York Times Book Review "A masterful epic."—People magazine "Mesmerizing . . . The Women in the Castle stands tall among the literature that reveals new truths about one of history’s most tragic eras."—USA Today Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined—an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding. Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows. First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin’s mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister’s wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war. As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war—each with their own unique share of challenges. Written with the devastating emotional power of The Nightingale, Sarah’s Key, and The Light Between Oceans, Jessica Shattuck’s evocative and utterly enthralling novel offers a fresh perspective on one of the most tumultuous periods in history. Combining piercing social insight and vivid historical atmosphere, The Women in the Castle is a dramatic yet nuanced portrait of war and its repercussions that explores what it means to survive, love, and, ultimately, to forgive in the wake of unimaginable hardship.
Call Number: SHAISBN: 9780062563668Publication Date: 2017-03-28
Anything Is Possible by
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout. Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors. Praise for Anything Is Possible "When Elizabeth Strout is on her game, is there anybody better? . . . This is a generous, wry book about everyday lives, and Strout crawls so far inside her characters you feel you inhabit them. . . . This is a book that earns its title. Try reading it without tears, or wonder."--USA Today (four stars) "Readers who loved My Name Is Lucy Barton . . . are in for a real treat. . . . Strout is a master of the story cycle form. . . . She paints cumulative portraits of the heartache and soul of small-town America by giving each of her characters a turn under her sympathetic spotlight."--NPR "These stories return Strout to the core of what she does more magnanimously than anyone else, which is to render quiet portraits of the indignities and disappointments of normal life, and the moments of grace and kindness we are gifted in response. . . . Strout hits the target yet again."--The Washington Post "In this wise and accomplished book, pain and healing exist in perpetual dependence, like feuding siblings."--The Wall Street Journal "Anything Is Possible confirms Strout as one of our most grace-filled, and graceful, writers."--The Boston Globe "In Elizabeth Strout's Anything Is Possible, her stunning follow-up to My Name Is Lucy Barton, a famous author returns to the Midwestern hometown of her childhood, touching off a daisy-chain of stories narrated by those who knew her--memories of trauma and goodwill, resentments small and large, and the ever-widening gulf between haves and have-nots. Strout, always good, just keeps getting better."--Vogue "If you miss the charmingly eccentric and completely relatable characters from Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout's best-selling My Name Is Lucy Barton, you'll be happily reunited with them in Strout's smart and soulful Anything Is Possible."--Elle "Strout pierces the inner worlds of these characters' most private behaviors, illuminating the emotional conflicts and pure joy of being human, of finding oneself in the search for the American dream."--NYLON
Call Number: STRISBN: 9780812989403Publication Date: 2017-04-25
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Isabel Allende
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T. Coraghessan Boyle
Geraldine Brooks
Michael Chabon
Paulo Coelho
Pat Conroy
E.L. Doctorow
Roddy Doyle
Umberto Eco
Jeffrey Eugenides
Sara Gruen
Alice Hoffman
Khaled Hosseini
Siri Hustvedt
John Irving
Howard Jacobson
Barbara Kingsolver
Milan Kundera
Jhumpa Lahiri
Ian McEwan
Susan Minot
Haruki Murakami
Joyce Carol Oates
Lawrence Osborne
Helen Oyeyemi
Orhan Pamuk
Ann Patchett
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Jane Smiley
Elizabeth Strout
Anne Tyler