East Central Regional Library

Title

Author

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On the way home from a conference, Don Piper's car was crushed by a semi-truck that crossed into his lane. Medical personnel said he died instantly. While his body lay lifeless inside the ruins of his car, Piper experienced the glories of heaven, awed by its beauty and music.

Wallace Stegner

Lyman Ward, a retired historian confined to a wheelchair, sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story of their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier, spanning four generations.   A Pulitzer Prize winner.

Life has dealt the women of Freesia Court many blows, but they have pulled together to face each challenge. As members of the Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons book group, they experience new lives full of laughter and love.

The romance between an insecure young Irishman and a talented, passionate Italian musician blossoms when her quartet visits the small town of Ennis in County Clare and transforms the lives of the unlikely pair and everyone around them.

The decade following World War II becomes one of tragedy, excitement, and unexpected change for the five Novak children and the residents of their western Pennsylvania community of company houses, church festivals, and union squabbles.

Myla Goldberg

An ordinary girl with exceptional spelling abilities, Eliza Naumann embarks on the “rough and tumble” circuit of spelling bees, where her quirky family comes up against the harsh realities of the world.

Ann Patchett

When terrorists seize hostages at an embassy party, an unlikely assortment of people is thrown together.

 

This memoir of wonderful summers growing up at a Minnesota lake brings back nostalgic personal memories to the reader! This is the story of Anderson’s family and friends and their 30 summers spent with his parents at their summer cottage on Pelican Lake in Minnesota.  The Scandinavian relatives are quite a crew - much can be learned from them. The slower pace, home made food, fresh berries and produce - it all comes together with the water, boats, fishing and just plain living.

In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America . This book told nearly a century later is about her extraordinary journey.

Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America 's place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.

When her fiancé, Mike is left paralyzed following a tragic accident, Carrie Bell begins to question her familiar world, her everyday life in Wisconsin and her relationships, and to rediscover her own identity.

In a modern-day interpretation of the biblical Book of Job, Hayden Reese, newly released from jail and living a marginal life in a remote California town, refuses to give up, despite the fact that it seems that God has further tests for him.

Killed in a tragic accident, Eddie, an elderly man who believes that he had an uninspired life, awakens in the afterlife, where he discovers that heaven consists of having five people explain the meaning of one's life.

Kate Jacobs

Once a week, an eclectic group of women comes together at a New York City yarn shop to work on their latest projects and share the stories of their lives.  At the center of Walker and Daughter is the shop’s owner, Georgia, who is overwhelmed with juggling the store and single-handedly raising her teenage daughter.  She escapes the demands of life at the Friday Night Knitting Club, but when her daughter’s father shows up, her world is shattered.  The women in the club discover that what they’ve created isn’t just a knitting club, it’s a sisterhood. 

In the summer of 1873, Per Hansa, his wife Beret, their children, and three other Norwegian immigrant families—Tonseten and his wife Kjersti, Hans Olsa and his wife Sorine, and the Solum brothers—settle in the Dakota Territory. Per's family becomes lost when they separate from the other wagons, but they eventually reache their destination. They establish a small settlement along Spring Creek, and everyone starts building sod-houses.

Marilynne Robinson

Pulitzer Prize winner
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine , saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather. He tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

Lois Lowry

Twelve-year-old Jonas lives in a seemingly ideal world, until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver. This utopian world and its lack of freedom become less desirable as he begins to understand the dark secrets behind the community. A 1994 Newbury Medal winner. Appropriate for both teens and adults.

Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.

January 1946:  Writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.  And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.

It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she was an independent woman, had a job of her own, a husband and child. But all of that is gone now...everything has changed. 038549081X

Marianne Fedrikkson

Sweeping through one hundred years of Scandinavian history, this luminous story follows three generations of Swedish women – a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter – whose lives are linked through a century of great love and great loss.

 

Resorting to elaborate physical challenges to get God's attention, ChiChi Maggiordino learns from her grandmother how to use the application of the Evil Eye to perform miracles but finds her life progressing out of control anyway.

Erik Larson's riveting and detailed account of that storm. It is also the story of Isaac Cline, the nascent National Weather Service, the town and people of Galveston, and America at the last turning of the century, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.

Charlotte Bronte

Written 1847 and considered a classic by many, this novel tells of the doomed love affair between the orphaned, independent-minded governess, Jane, and her gruff employer, Mr. Rochester.

On a visit to her childhood home in Texas, Julie Powell pulls her mother's battered copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking off the bookshelf. And the book calls out to her. Pushing thirty, living in a run-down apartment in Queens, and working at a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell is stuck. She invents a deranged assignment: in the space of one year, she will cook every recipe in the Julia Child classic, all 524 of them. No skips, no substitutions. And if it doesn't help her make sense of her life, at least she'll eat really, really well. How hard could it be?

A young kitchen boy, as the only surviving witness, tells his tale of the 1918 Bolshevik revolutionary murder of Czar Nicholas II and the rest of the Russian royal family.

Brunonia Barry

Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations.  Now the disappearance of two women is bringing Towner back home to Salem – and is brining to light the shocking truth about the death of her twin sister.

Kao Kalia Yang

Presents the journey from a refugee camp in Thailand to Minnesota and the hardships and joys of Kao Kalia’s Hmong family’s struggle to adapt to a strange culture while holding onto traditions that are passed down from her beloved grandmother

En route with his family from their home in India to Canada, their cargo ship sinks, and Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat -- alone, save for a few surviving animals, some of the very same animals Pi's zookeeper father warned him would tear him to pieces if they got a chance. Pi's seafaring journey becomes a test of survival, but of everything he's learned -- about man and beast, their creator, and the nature of truth itself.

Alice Sebold

In the second sentence, the narrator, Susie Salmon, announces, "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." A neighbor lures her to his hideaway as she heads home that day.  As the tragedy of Susie’s death unfolds in her own narration, with compelling but never vulgar detail, her family, friends and her community grieve and come to accept her death.   Appropriate for both teens and adults.

So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.

Arthur Golden

With the wisdom of age and in a voice that is both haunting and immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha.  Here is a world where appearances are paramount; a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder, and women are trained to beguile the most powerful men.  And love is scorned and treated as an illusion.

Christopher Bohjalian

A talented midwife is arrested for murder when she saves a baby by performing a Caesarean section once she believes the mother has died--only to have her assistant insist later that the woman was still very much alive. Told in the mesmerizing voice of the midwife's daughter, Midwives depicts the aftermath of the tragedy.

Marlo Morgan

In this fictional account originally published in 1994, an American woman's 4-month odyssey through the Australian Outback with native people there sends a message about living in harmony with the world around.

The unforgettable story of an immigrant woman’s life on the Nebraska plains.  The novel portrays a community struggling with unforgiving terrain and a woman, Antonia Shimerda, who amid great hardship, stands as a timeless inspiration. 

A summer in a Southern town during the polio scare of the 1950s, the swimming pools closed, children are sent to the country to avoid contagion. The heroine is a white girl who stays behind, playing with the daughter of a black maid.

Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.

In an attempt to understand the lives of Americans earning near-minimum wages, Ehrenreich works as a waitress in Florida , a cleaning woman in Maine , and a sales clerk in Minnesota .

The summer of 1876 feels like the end of the world to fourteen-year-old Asa Senger. Locusts plague the prairie farms; his family is about to lose everything. The Dakota Indians have been banished from Minnesota, yet an aged Indian appears. Asa’s father, the sheriff, jails him, counting on a bounty payment, but Asa wants to set him free.  The James-Younger gang, preparing to rob Northfield, stops at their farmhouse. What has propelled them into his life?

Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens--until a student enters the local high school with an arsenal of guns and starts shooting, changing the lives of everyone inside and out. The daughter of the judge sitting on the case is the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened in front of her own eyes. Or can she?

Alexander McCall Smith

Apparent simplicity combines with sophisticated storytelling in this unusual detective story about Precious Ramotswe, the “Miss Marple of Botswana ” according to The NY Times Book Review , and her drive to solve the mysteries of people's lives through her Ladies' Detective Agency.

Tim O’Brien

--MN Author

Originally published in 1975, this novel explores the relationship between two brothers: one who went to Vietnam and one who stayed at home. As the two struggle against an unexpected blizzard in Minnesota's remote north woods, what they discover about themselves and each other will change both of them forever.

In this saga of the American heartland at the turn of the century, a young woman fights to build her Nebraska homestead, as she remembers Carl Lindstrom, the dreamer who left the prairie.

Jim Fergus

An account of the controversial “Brides for Indians” clandestine government program to assimilate Native Americans into white culture is told here in  fiction form.

 

Beginning with a failed suicide pact between two teenagers, Emily and her boyfriend Chris Harte, this story traces the growth of the complex relationship between the kids and their families, combining elements of mystery with the sensitive exploration of a tragic subject.

Discovering a cache of valuable Native American artifacts while appraising an estate in New Hampshire , Faye Travers investigates the history of a ceremonial drum, which possesses spiritual powers and changes the lives of people who encounter it.

Anne Tyler

There is a lot to smile about in this story of a lovable loser, Barnaby Gaitlin, who's been in trouble ever since adolescence. But he is trying to get his life in order.

Leif Enger

--MN Author

The 11-year-old boy at the center of this Aitkin County (MN) author’s first novel, Rube, recalls the events of his childhood, in small-town Minnesota circa 1962, and captures the poetic, verbal stoicism of the northern Great Plains. "Here's what I saw," Rube warns his readers. "Here's how it went. Make of it what you will." And Rube sees plenty.
Amazon.com’s Claire Dederer says, “Enger finds something quietly heroic in the bred-in-the-bone Minnesota decency of America's heartland.”

Jodi Picoult

The discovery of a dead baby under a pile of old blankets in Aaron Fisher’s barn sets off a scandal in Amish country and investigation that could implicate fisher’s eighteen-year-old daughter.

 

Donna Woolfork Cross

Joan's struggle to keep her identity as a woman, of her bittersweet love affair, and of her rise to the highest position in the Catholic Church, are told with energy and detail in this fictionalized account of this strong and intelligent woman.

John Irving

In summer 1953, 11-year-old Owen Meany, hits a foul ball in a Little League baseball game that kills his best friend's mother.  What happens to him after that fateful day is amazing and terrifying, and unforgettable; ‘a meditation on literature, history, and God’, says Tim Appelo, Amazon.com reviewer.

The wife and children of Noah, who has been directed by God to build an ark, witness the ark's construction and assist in gathering myriad animals before finding themselves trapped within the ark during a cataclysmic flood

Barbara Kingsolver

Three interwoven stories of human love amid the lush mountains and farms of southern Appalachia celebrate the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself.

Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy -- the effects of which not only divide Leigh’s family, but polarize the entire community.

Struggling with single parenthood and a scandal that cost him his political career, Bernard Doyle fights his disappointment with his adopted sons' career choices before a violent event forces the members of his family to reconsider their priorities.  Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you've never even met.

Sarah, a ten-year-old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in Paris 1942.  Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard – their secret hiding place and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released.  Sixty years later, Sarah’s story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. 

Sue Monk Kidd

The richly drawn novel is Lily's coming-of-age story, shining with the power of women around her, all seeking forgiveness and healing, and all discovering what family is really about.

Mackenzie Allen Phillips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.

Who knew that a German submarine U-869, long thought to have been sunk off Gibraltar in 1945, was actually sunk by its own torpedo less than 60 miles from Brielle , New Jersey ? No one--until 1991,when two death-cheating wreck-divers began exploring the boat's wrecked hull, 230 feet underwater.

1997 winner of the general nonfiction National Book Critics Circle Award. Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance." The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling.

Can evil be forgiven?  In this book club selection, philosophers, critics, and writers, including Robert Coles, the Dalai Lama, Harold S. Kushner, Albert Speer, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and forty-eight others explore forgiveness and other moral issues involved in a young Jews' response to a dying Nazi's confession of mass murder.
 

During World War II, a family finds life turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the strangers.

Sarah Stonich

--MN Author

In this story of friendship and a marriage, Isobel - hat maker, wife, and mother - recalls the haunting and fateful summer of 1936 when her world was transformed.

Dottie Connell farms her family's farm in rural Ohio alone, having sacrificed love and family for land she does not own. When the daughter of her childhood friend is left in her care, she must face the past she has worked 15 years to forget.

Audrey Niffenegger

A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrate tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who involuntarily travels through time, and Claire Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course.  Henry and Claire’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love.

In this explosive and timely novel, T. Coraghessan Boyle explores an issue that is at the forefront of the political arena. He confronts the controversy over illegal immigration head-on, illuminating through a poignant, gripping story the people on both sides of the issue, the haves and the have-nots.

In 1993 a mountaineer named Greg MOrtenson drifted into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram mountains after a failed attempt to climb K2. Moved by the inhabitants' kindness, he promised to return and build a school. Over the next decade Mortenson built 55 schools in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban.

Julia Glass

The nuances of human relationships over three summers in the McLeod family, shifting between Scotland , Greece , the West Village of New York City and Long Island , form a richly layered story from a first-time novelist. This book contains adult material.

A chronicle of a two-decade friendship between Patchett and poet Lucy Grealy. It is a portrait of unwavering commitment through love, fame, drugs and despair.

The story of the Lucas family, who live in a beautiful and remote part of Wisconsin inhabited by working-class European immigrants and the Ojibwe. By 1967 the Lucas farm has fallen into disrepair, thanks to the hard drinking of John Lucas, who brutalizes his wife and two sons. When the eldest, James, escapes by enlisting to fight in Vietnam , he leaves young Bill alone to protect his mother with only his own will and the spirit of his brother to guide him.

A tale of survival follows two old women who are abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine.  They now must survive on their own or die trying.  Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful.  

Stephen Ambrose

As the land west of the Rockies is explored for the first time by white men, this historical account tells of the adventure and drama associated with such an event in detail.

Geneva Jordan , megastar of stage, screen and television, has a command performance in Minnesota , where she agrees to look after her thirteen-year-old nephew, a boy with Down's syndrome while his parents take a long-overdue vacation. Discovering an old scrapbook she and her sister created in their youth starts Geneva thinking of things beyond fame.

Elizabeth Berg

On a cross-country journey to see her long-estranged mother, Ginny remembers the summer she turned twelve, with its family pains and growth.

Geraldine Brooks

Eighteen –year-old Anna Frith tells the story of her remote English village, Eyam, which was infected by the plague in 1666 and where,  persuaded by their vicar, the townspeople decided to quarantine themselves.