Literary Fiction

Literary Fiction

Are you the type of person that needs a lot of depth in your ebooks?  Are you interested in contemplating significant social or political issues while you enjoy fiction?  Then, you've come to the right place.  We feature bestselling authors of ebooks in our Literary Fiction genre, and they bring their epic works to you either free or discounted.  

 

Definition of the "Literary Fiction Genre": A central aspect of the Literary Fiction genre of ebooks is that they do not focus on plot as much a they focus on theme.  Thus, commentary on a social issue, or the growth of a character from a human aspect during a story are the central parts of Literary Fiction ebooks.  This, naturally, stands in stark contrast to "mainstream" fiction, which focuses more on plot and how the plot is driven by action or tension.  Other important aspects of Literary Fiction ebooks is that their pace tends to be slower, and due to the substance they address, they are "darker" or "heavier" than fiction ebooks in other genres.

 

Some examples of bestselling ebooks in the Literary Fiction genre are J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye), Aldous Hudley (Brave New World), Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See), Catherine Ryan Hyde (When I Found You) and Kimberly McCreight (Reconstructing Amelia: A Novel).

An American Marriage (Oprah's Book Club): A Novel

by Tayari Jones

 

A NEW YORK TIMES AND WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK

A 2018 BEST OF THE YEAR SELECTION OF NPR  * TIME  * BUSTLE  * O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE  * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS  * AMAZON.COM

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB 2018 SELECTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION


“A moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple.” —Barack Obama

“Haunting . . . Beautifully written.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Brilliant and heartbreaking . . . Unforgettable.” —USA Today
 
“A tense and timely love story . . . Packed with brave questions about race and class.” —People
 
“Compelling.” —The Washington Post
 
“Epic . . . Transcendent . . . Triumphant.” —Elle


Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.
 
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

 

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He Never Forgot How to Love

by Larry W. Plummer


Jake escapes his horrific captivity as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Cassie is a caregiver at the military hospital and nurses Jake back to health. Their love begins over a bowl of Jell-O and carries them back home to the Kansas farm.

Everywhere life takes them, there are others with the same haunting dreams of war. Some have only one leg and some have none. Some have just lost their way home. Cassie and Jake begin with one person at a time and over 27 years, hundreds of vets find a little peace on the bank of the farm pond, and they learn to reach back and help another buddy up the hill.

The best and the worst of us live in these pages and the depth of Jake and Cassie’s love can be understood only in the context of the world they dared to change.

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The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman


In exquisite prose, Hoffman offers a transforming glimpse of small-town America, presenting more than three hundred years of passion, dark secrets, loyalty, and redemption in a web of tales where characters' lives are intertwined by fate and by their own actions.

The Red Garden introduces us to the luminous and haunting world of Blackwell, Massachusetts, capturing the unexpected turns in its history and in our own lives. From the town's founder, a brave young woman from England who has no fear of blizzards or bears, to the young man who runs away to New York City with only his dog for company, the characters in The Red Garden are extraordinary and vivid: a young wounded Civil War soldier who is saved by a passionate neighbor, a woman who meets a fiercely human historical character, a poet who falls in love with a blind man, a mysterious traveler who comes to town in the year when summer never arrives.

At the center of everyone’s life is a mysterious garden where only red plants can grow, and where the truth can be found by those who dare to look.

Beautifully crafted and shimmering with magic, The Red Garden is as unforgettable as it is moving.

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East of Eden

by John Steinbeck


A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America’s most enduring authors, in a commemorative hardcover edition
 
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century.

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The Address: A Novel

by Fiona Davis


THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Fiona Davis, author of The Dollhouse, returns with a compelling novel about the thin lines between love and loss, success and ruin, passion and madness, all hidden behind the walls of The Dakota—New York City’s most famous residence.


After a failed apprenticeship, working her way up to head housekeeper of a posh London hotel is more than Sara Smythe ever thought she’d make of herself. But when a chance encounter with Theodore Camden, one of the architects of the grand New York apartment house The Dakota, leads to a job offer, her world is suddenly awash in possibility—no mean feat for a servant in 1884. The opportunity to move to America, where a person can rise above one’s station. The opportunity to be the female manager of The Dakota, which promises to be the greatest apartment house in the world. And the opportunity to see more of Theo, who understands Sara like no one else...and is living in The Dakota with his wife and three young children.

In 1985, Bailey Camden is desperate for new opportunities. Fresh out of rehab, the former party girl and interior designer is homeless, jobless, and penniless. Two generations ago, Bailey’s grandfather was the ward of famed architect Theodore Camden. But the absence of a genetic connection means Bailey won’t see a dime of the Camden family’s substantial estate. Instead, her “cousin” Melinda—Camden’s biological great-granddaughter—will inherit almost everything. So when Melinda offers to let Bailey oversee the renovation of her lavish Dakota apartment, Bailey jumps at the chance, despite her dislike of Melinda’s vision. The renovation will take away all the character and history of the apartment Theodore Camden himself lived in...and died in, after suffering multiple stab wounds by a madwoman named Sara Smythe, a former Dakota employee who had previously spent seven months in an insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island.

One hundred years apart, Sara and Bailey are both tempted by and struggle against the golden excess of their respective ages—for Sara, the opulence of a world ruled by the Astors and Vanderbilts; for Bailey, the free-flowing drinks and cocaine in the nightclubs of New York City—and take refuge and solace in the Upper West Side’s gilded fortress. But a building with a history as rich—and often tragic—as The Dakota’s can’t hold its secrets forever, and what Bailey discovers in its basement could turn everything she thought she knew about Theodore Camden—and the woman who killed him—on its head.

With rich historical detail, nuanced characters, and gorgeous prose, Fiona Davis once again delivers a compulsively readable novel that peels back the layers of not only a famed institution, but the lives—and lies—of the beating hearts within.

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Thirteen Ways of Looking: Fiction

by Colum McCann


NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • The Independent

In such acclaimed novels as Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic, National Book Award–winning author Colum McCann has transfixed readers with his precision, tenderness, and authority. Now, in his first collection of short fiction in more than a decade, McCann charts the territory of chance, and the profound and intimate consequences of even our smallest moments.

“As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.”

In the exuberant title novella, a retired judge reflects on his life’s work, unaware as he goes about his daily routines that this particular morning will be his last. In “Sh’khol,” a mother spending Christmas alone with her son confronts the unthinkable when he disappears while swimming off the coast near their home in Ireland. In “Treaty,” an elderly nun catches a snippet of a news report in which it is revealed that the man who once kidnapped and brutalized her is alive, masquerading as an agent of peace. And in “What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?” a writer constructs a story about a Marine in Afghanistan calling home on New Year’s Eve.

Deeply personal, subtly subversive, at times harrowing, and indeed funny, yet also full of comfort, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a striking achievement. With unsurpassed empathy for his characters and their inner lives, Colum McCann forges from their stories a profound tribute to our search for meaning and grace. The collection is a rumination on the power of storytelling in a world where language and memory can sometimes falter, but in the end do not fail us, and a contemplation of the healing power of literature.

Praise for Thirteen Ways of Looking

“Extraordinary . . . incandescent.”Chicago Tribune

“The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in some strikingly effective ways. . . . [The first story] is as fascinating as it is poignant. . . . [The second] captures the mundane and mysterious aspects of shaping characters from the gray clay of words, placing them in realistic settings and breathing life into their lungs. . . . That he makes the story so emotionally compelling is a sign of his genius. . . . The most remarkable [piece] is Sh’khol. . . . Caught in the rushing currents of this drama, you know you’re reading a little masterpiece.”The Washington Post

“McCann is a writer of power and subtlety and beauty. . . . The powerful title story loiters in the mind long after you’ve read it.”—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

“[McCann] unspools complex and unforgettable stories in this, his first collection in more than a decade.”The Boston Globe

“McCann is a passionate writer whose impulse is always toward a generous understanding of his diverse characters.”The Wall Street Journal

“Powerful, profound, and deeply empathetic, McCann’s beautifully wrought writing in Thirteen Ways of Looking glides off the page.”BuzzFeed

“McCann weaves the magic that made Let the Great World Spin so acclaimed.”The Huffington Post

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Hollywood Daze

by S.Moroni


Hollywood: where one love-scene can ruin your life.

Mona, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout, is sitting in the bar of the Beverly Hills Hotel, trying not to attract the attention of Maddy Miller, a hotshot producer, who'll decide if her brother Joost Larvink, gets to make his Hollywood debut. But before she knows it, Mona is knee-deep in Hollywood politics and some desperate characters, including a stoner screenwriter, engaged to Maddy's daughter, an action hero jock still in the closet and a forty plus A-list star about to become box office poison. All Mona wants to do is drink and float in the pool. But with her brother's career at stake, Mona has to do something. Anything!

Even if it means putting herself and her new best friend in harms way, in Moroni's gleeful and riotous takedown of Hollywood.

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The Pool Boy's Beatitude

by DJ Swykert


In space, the expansion of the universe exceeds the speed of light. In a jail cell the speed of light slows, time ages and deteriorates slowly to a crawl.

Jack Joseph understands physics. He understands the nature of quarks, leptons, dark matter and the desire to find the God particle. What Jack doesn’t understand is Jack.

He has a Masters degree in particle physics, an ex-wife, a sugar mama, a passion for cooking and chronic dependencies he needs to feed. He cleans pools to maintain this chaotic lifestyle.

Spinning about in a Large Hadron Collider of his own making, the particle known as Jack is about to collide with a particle known as Sarah.

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To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts: Stories

by Caitlin Hamilton Summie

In these ten elegantly written short stories, Caitlin Hamilton Summie takes readers from WWII Kansas City to a poor, drug-ridden neighborhood in New York, and from the quiet of rural Minnesota to its pulsing Twin Cities, each time navigating the geographical boundaries that shape our lives as well as the geography of tender hearts, loss, and family bonds. Deeply moving and memorable, To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts examines the importance of family, the defining nature of place, the need for home, and the hope of reconciliation.

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All the Tomorrows

by Nillu Nasser

 

Sometimes we can’t escape the webs we are born into. Sometimes we are the architects of our own fall.

WINNER: Pinnacle Book Achievement Award - Summer 2018 - Best Women's Fiction

Midwest Book Reviews says, "Replete with hard lessons, determined dreams, and illusions and realities surrounding love and relationships, All the Tomorrows is a gripping saga set under the sweltering heat of not just India, but hearts on fire."

Akash Choudry wants a love for all time, not an arranged marriage. Still, under the weight of parental hopes, he agrees to one. He and Jaya marry in a cloud of colour and spice in Bombay. Their marriage has barely begun when Akash embarks on an affair.

Jaya can’t contemplate sharing her husband with another woman, or looking past his indiscretions as her mother suggests. Cornered by sexual politics, she takes her fate into her own hands in the form of a lit match.

Nothing endures fire. As shards of their past threaten their future, will Jaya ever bloom into the woman she can be, and will redemption be within Akash’s reach?

Romuald Dzemo, Readers' Favorite Book Reviews (5 Stars), says, "All the Tomorrows by Nillu Nasser is a gripping tale of love and betrayal... The story is compelling and original, and it immediately transports the reader into the heart of a culture, a setting that reflects the thrills and perils of Bombay, capturing powerful images of the place in vivid clarity, from the dust of the overcrowded streets to the morality of Bombay. The characters are memorable, well-developed, and deeply explored. The conflict is strong and the reader is captivated as it escalates into a crisis point. All the Tomorrows is a wonderful read and the humanity that is injected into the writing will greatly appeal to readers. Nillu Nasser is a gifted and a great entertainer. This novel is balanced and utterly engrossing."

Evolved Publishing presents a raw glimpse inside one couple's struggles to deal with cultural traditions, and to reconcile those expectations with their own desires. [DRM-Free]

More Great Literary and Women's Fiction from Evolved Publishing:

  • Yours to Keep or Throw Aside by E.D. Martin
  • White Chalk by P.K. Tyler
  • Cassia by Lanette Kauten
  • The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky by David Litwack
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The Hours: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics)

by Michael Cunningham

 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel becomes a motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, directed by Stephen Daldry from a screenplay by David Hare

The Hours tells the story of three women: Virginia Woolf, beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway as she recuperates in a London suburb with her husband in 1923; Clarissa Vaughan, beloved friend of an acclaimed poet dying from AIDS, who in modern-day New York is planning a party in his honor; and Laura Brown, in a 1949 Los Angeles suburb, who slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home. By the end of the novel, these three stories intertwine in remarkable ways, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace.

The Hours is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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I Remember You: A Ruby's Place Novel

by Holly Schindler

 

The Ultimate Christmas Wish

To see that special someone once more. Tell them everything you didn’t get to say while they were alive. Right wrongs. Mend disagreements. Or simply relive special moments spent together. Fall in love for the first time all over again.

At Ruby’s Place, where “spirits” are more than the dusty liquors in bottles behind the bar, where voices from the past celebrate yet another Christmas Eve, your ultimate Christmas wish might just be granted…

 

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Swans Are Fat Too

by Michelle Granas

An Amazon #1 Best Seller in Eastern European Literature; Top 100 in World Literature and Women's Fiction.


Natalia Lanska, formidable Polish pianist, is dead. No one is really sorrowing, except maybe her granddaughter Hania, whose own career as a concert artist never took off due to a terrible weight problem. Feeling unwanted, Hania arrives in Warsaw for the funeral hoping for a warm welcome from her relatives. Instead, they saddle her with their appalling children, decamp, and refuse to return. Hania’s situation is at first improved and then complicated when a neighbor--the very correct, very austere descendant of an old Polish family--asks her to proofread an amateur history project. Hania sets to work with a will, and Pan Doctor Prince Konstanty Radzimoyski is surprised when his ideas get more editing than he bargained for. Typing pages of the past, rediscovering her native city, and playing the piano all contribute to taking Hania’s mind off her problems, but can’t change her awareness that the children need help and that her growing attachment to her employer will only give her pain. The summer Hania spends between love, hostility, and the weight of history tests her resourcefulness, but her fresh ideas and readiness to carry on brighten the lives of her new acquaintances. Still, no one, least of all Hania herself, expects that her beautiful qualities will make Konstanty forget her figure and other excess baggage. This book contains a history of Poland in a nutshell and is about seeing beyond the conventions.

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An Incomplete List of My Wishes

by Jendi Reiter

 

•  • •  WINNER — 2017 SUNSHOT BOOK PRIZE™ FOR FICTION  • • •

A middle-aged secretary finds unlikely common ground with the death row inmate who may, or may not, have murdered her daughter. Superhero comics help a gay bar mitzvah boy cope with his discovery of his father's adulterous double life. A suburban businesswoman learns how to grieve a long-ago bereavement through her strange attraction to the birthmother of the child she wants to adopt. An elderly Russian professor crashes a stranger's wedding to prove that he is not losing his memory, inadvertently healing a decades-long rift between friends. In these and other stories, Reiter explores the fraught relationships among queer and straight family members, the search for a post-traumatic spirituality, and the fine line between soulmates and intimate enemies.

Jendi Reiter's debut story collection, An Incomplete List of My Wishes, received the 2017 Sunshot Book Prize. The stories in An Incomplete List of My Wishes have won prizes from such journals as The Iowa Review, New Letters, Bayou Magazine, Solstice Lit Mag, and American Fiction.

New York Times bestselling novelist Jacqueline Sheehan says of this collection: "Truth and humor are woven intricately, ripe with emotion and stripped down to the bone. You will read these again and again."

 

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The Promise (The Golden City Book Three)

by A.B. Michaels

HE’LL RISK EVERYTHING TO KEEP HIS WORD
... IF THE GOLDEN CITY WILL LET HIM

April 18, 1906. A massive earthquake has decimated much of San Francisco, leaving thousands without food, water or shelter. Patrolling the streets to help those in need, Army corporal Ben Tilson meets a young woman named Charlotte who touches his heart, making him think of a future with her in it. In the heat of the moment he makes a promise to her family that even he realizes will be almost impossible to keep.

Because on the heels of the earthquake, a much worse disaster looms: a fire that threatens to consume everything and everyone in its path.

It will take everything Ben’s got to make it back to the woman he's fallen for—and even that may not be enough.
The Promise , a stand-alone novella, is Book Three in A.B.Michaels' historical fiction series "The Golden City."
 

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The Second Cortez

by Chadwick Wall


In the seaside colonial city of Veracruz, Mexico, thirty-two-year-old literature professor Nicolás Nolano lives a life of ease and pleasure—and he strives to keep it that way. Though his district attorney brother has joined both the folk healer who raised them and a powerful priest in publicly crusading against the Segundo Cortez cartel, Nicolás refuses their attempts to get him involved. When two days of atrocities terrorize Veracruz, where the police and government are allied with Segundo Cortez, Nicolás must decide if he will make his stand at last.

From the coastal boardwalk and cobblestone plazas of Veracruz, to the Arizona desert and streets of Santa Fe, to the northern Rockies and lakeshore towns of Montana, Nicolás endures a journey he would have never imagined.

As Segundo Cortez grows by the day—murdering with reckless abandon—Nicolás is met with a monumental dilemma. Will he choose between suicidal vengeance and fighting for his beloved hometown, or pursuing a life among close friends and his newfound true love?

One thing is certain: Nicolás is set to encounter the greatest surprises of his life.

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Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: A Novel

by Gail Honeyman


#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick

“Beautifully written and incredibly funny, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is about the importance of friendship and human connection. I fell in love with Eleanor, an eccentric and regimented loner whose life beautifully unfolds after a chance encounter with a stranger; I think you will fall in love, too!” —Reese Witherspoon


No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine. 

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. 

But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.

Soon to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the smart, warm, and uplifting story of an out-of-the-ordinary heroine whose deadpan weirdness and unconscious wit make for an irresistible journey as she realizes. . .
 
The only way to survive is to open your heart. 

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The Last Checkout

by Peter Besson

 

NOW A CURRENT SEMI-FINALIST FOR THE 2018 DEL SOL PRESS PRIZE FOR FIRST NOVEL

If there ever was a bad time to fall in love, dangling by the neck from a rope tied to a chandelier would be it, but love just doesn’t care... 

By the year 2031, global warming cooks the planet, endless wars sweep the globe and pollution tries to finish everybody off. Science has declared re-incarnation a fact and legally sanctioned death houses have sprouted up like mushrooms in overcrowded cities. Those so-called ‘Last Resorts’ provide the paying guest with the tools and the know-how for a successful exit from life—with one simple rule: once checked in, the check-out is feet-first only.

Nobody leaves a ‘Last Resort’ alive.

Ansel Grayson has been a resident at the ‘Hotel Terminus’ for over twelve years, unable to take the last step. On the day he finally works up the nerve to check out and hang himself, he is interrupted by Nikki Forlan, the most recent addition to the guest list.
Ansel and Nikki, broken by life, find themselves drawn into each other’s orbit, and with their final check-outs looming, they try to discover a reason to live, certain they will have to die.

 

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Small Great Things: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult


#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • With richly layered characters and a gripping moral dilemma that will lead readers to question everything they know about privilege, power, and race, Small Great Things is the stunning new page-turner from Jodi Picoult.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

“[Picoult] offers a thought-provoking examination of racism in America today, both overt and subtle. Her many readers will find much to discuss in the pages of this topical, moving book.”—Booklist (starred review)

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than twenty years’ experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she’s been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don’t want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders or does she intervene?

Ruth hesitates before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime. Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy. Conflicted by Kennedy’s counsel, Ruth tries to keep life as normal as possible for her family—especially her teenage son—as the case becomes a media sensation. As the trial moves forward, Ruth and Kennedy must gain each other’s trust, and come to see that what they’ve been taught their whole lives about others—and themselves—might be wrong.

With incredible empathy, intelligence, and candor, Jodi Picoult tackles race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion—and doesn’t offer easy answers. Small Great Things is a remarkable achievement from a writer at the top of her game.

Praise for Small Great Things

Small Great Things is the most important novel Jodi Picoult has ever written. . . . It will challenge her readers . . . [and] expand our cultural conversation about race and prejudice.”The Washington Post

“A novel that puts its finger on the very pulse of the nation that we live in today . . . a fantastic read from beginning to end, as can always be expected from Picoult, this novel maintains a steady, page-turning pace that makes it hard for readers to put down.”San Francisco Book Review

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The Quiet American

by Graham Greene


A “masterful . . . brilliantly constructed novel” of love and chaos in 1950s Vietnam (Zadie Smith, The Guardian).
 
It’s 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it’s not just a political tangle that’s kept him tethered to the country. There’s also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor colonialism is what’s best for Southeast Asia, but rather a “Third Force”: American democracy by any means necessary. His ideas of conquest include Phuong, to whom he promises a sweet life in the states. But as Pyle’s blind moral conviction wreaks havoc upon innocent lives, it’s ultimately his romantic compulsions that will play a role in his own undoing.
 
Although criticized upon publication as anti-American, Graham Greene’s “complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue” would, in a few short years, prove prescient in its own condemnation of American interventionism (The New York Times).

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