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Wonder
Born with a facial deformity that initially prevented his attendance at public school, Auggie Pullman enters the fifth grade at Beecher Prep and struggles with the dynamics of being both new and different, in a sparsely written tale about acceptance and self-esteem.
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Starry River of the Sky
Discovering that the moon has disappeared from the sky above a Chinese village where he works, runaway Rendi wonders about strange local behaviors until a mysterious storyteller arrives at the town's inn and astonishing transformations begin to happen. By the award-winning creator of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. 75,000 first printing.
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Liar & Spy
Seventh-grader Georges adjusts to moving from a house to an apartment, his father's efforts to start a new business, his mother's extra shifts as a nurse, being picked on at school, and Safer, a boy who wants his help spying on another resident of their building.
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Who Could That Be at This Hour?
Thirteen-year-old Lemony Snicket begins his apprenticeship with S. Theodora Markson of the secretive V.F.D. in the tiny dot of a town called Stain'd By The Sea, where he helps investigate the theft of a statue.
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The Twelve Tribes Of Hattie
In 1923, 15-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children, whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. Captured here in 12 luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother's monumental courage and the journey of a nation.NPR Bestseller
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Fairy Tales From The Brothers Grimm
A New English Version
The acclaimed author of the His Dark Materials trilogy presents mature and scholarly retellings of 50 favorite and lesser-known fairy tales on the 200th anniversary of the Grimm brothers' Children's and Household Tales, in a volume that includes such stories as "Cinderella," "Rapunzel" and "Briar-Rose." 30,000 first printing.
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Building Stories
The award-winning creator of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth presents an intricately illustrated, sprawling tale about the residents in a three-story Chicago apartment building, including a lonely single woman, a couple who are growing to despise each other and an elderly landlady.
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The Best American Short Stories 2012
Tom Perrotta, author of Election and The Leftovers, curates a collection of 2012's best short fiction.NPR Bestseller
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The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012
Dave Eggers and his students at 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs present literature from mainstream and alternative American periodicals, including fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, television writing and alternative comics.
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Cold Comfort Farm
When a well-educated young socialite in 1930s England is left orphaned and unable to support herself at age twenty-two, she moves in with her eccentric relatives on their farm. Reissue.
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The Lifeboat
Forced into an overcrowded lifeboat after a mysterious explosion on their trans-Atlantic ocean liner, newly widowed Grace Winter battles the elements and the other survivors, and remembers her husband, Henry, who set his own safety aside to ensure Grace's.NPR Bestseller
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The Round House
When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 13-year-old Joe Coutts sets out with his three friends to find the person who destroyed his family.NPR Bestseller
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NW
Growing up in the same 1970s urban planning development in Northwest London, four young people pursue independent and reasonably successful lives until one of them is abruptly drawn out of her isolation by a stranger who is seeking her help.NPR Bestseller
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The Orchardist
When two skittish pregnant girls appear on his homestead, solitary orchardist Talmadge — who carefully tends the grove of fruit trees he has cultivated for nearly half a century — vows to save and protect them. The Orchardist evokes a powerful sense of place in the American West, mixing tenderness and violence as Talmadge tries to reconcile the ghosts of his own troubled past and faces the dramatic consequences of his actions.NPR Bestseller
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American Ghost
A tale based on a true story traces the unresolved history of a family against a backdrop of racial tensions in a Florida community, where Jolie, the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher, falls in love with a Jewish anthropology student who is targeted by violence and who reunites with Jolie years later when they resolve mistakes and expose local secrets. 35,000 first printing.
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The Art Forger
An artist whose reputation has been tarnished stumbles on a piece of art that disappeared 25 years ago and agrees to forge it for a gallery owner — until she realizes that the art she is forging may itself be a forgery.NPR Bestseller
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City Of Women
Hiding her clandestine activities behind the persona of a model Nazi soldier's wife at the height of World War II, Sigrid Schroeder dreams of her former Jewish lover and risks everything to hide a mother and two young children who she believes might be her lover's family. A first novel.
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Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures
In the wake of a tragedy, Elsa flees her once-idyllic family home in Wisconsin to pursue an acting career in golden-age Hollywood. She becomes an Academy Award-winning actress and enjoys the heady extravagances of her fame while struggling to remain true to herself and balance the needs of her family.
News and Reviews
The News from Spain
7 Variations on a Love Story
A virtuosic collection of stories that explores the power of love and the impossibility of controlling or understanding it features characters from various times and regions, from Mozart's 18th-century collaboration with librettist Da Ponte to a 1940s love triangle involving a doctor, a journalist and a President's wife. By the National Book Award finalist author of The Suicide Index. 25,000 first printing.
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The Middlesteins
Two siblings with very different personalities attempt to take control of their mother's food obsession and massive weight gain to save her life after their father walks out and leaves her reeling in the Chicago suburbs.
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Object Lessons
The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story
20 contemporary authors — including Dave Eggers, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Morrie More, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme and more — present 20 classic short stories from the The Paris Review.
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The Odds
Struggling with job losses, the imminent foreclosure of their home and a floundering marriage, Art and Marion Fowler liquidate their savings and reserve the bridal suite at a Niagara Falls casino, where they make high-risk bets in the hopes of fixing their finances.
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Canada
After his parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank, 15-year-old Dell Parsons is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, who — unbeknownst to Dell — is hiding a dark and violent nature that interferes with Dell's quest to find grace and peace on the prairie of Saskatchewan.NPR Bestseller
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Girlchild
Obsessively following the edicts of the Girl Scouts Handbook in spite of her lack of a troop, young Rory longs to escape the Reno trailer park where she lives with her bartender mother.
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This Is How You Lose Her
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao presents a lyrical collection of stories that explore the heartbreak and radiance of love as it is shaped by passion, betrayal and the echoes of intimacy.NPR Bestseller
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Beautiful Ruins
On a rocky patch of Italian coastline, circa 1962, a daydreaming young innkeeper has an almost-love affair with a beautiful American starlet. She draws him into her glittering world, from the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the back lots of contemporary Hollywood, and both begin to cling to an improbable dream.NPR Bestseller
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2312
The latest novel from Robinson, author of the celebrated "Mars Trilogy," deals with what's happened to humanity since colonizing most of the solar system. The action begins when a politician-scientist from Mercury secretly makes a disturbing discovery about how power is being consolidated among just a few planets in the system. But just as she and her colleagues decide to do something about it, a series of possible crimes undermine their cause — including the politician's death. The politician's troubled granddaughter Swan, an artist and biosphere designer, is left to deal with the consequences.
News and Reviews
After the Apocalypse
Stories
This collection of dark short stories takes place somewhere in a near future where the U.S. economy has crumbled, dirty bombs are commonplace in American cities and prion diseases are eating everyone's brains. A prisoner dumped into Cleveland's "zombie preserve" sees his bloodthirsty companions not as monsters, but as a new kind of wildlife. A teenager watches her mother slipping away into madness as disease eats her brain, but worries more about how to escape her mother's girlfriend, a hoarder who is slowly filling their home with piles of junk. A woman who sells dolls on the internet has to deal with an online reputation she never asked for, and hip-hop loving Chinese factory workers are fomenting socialist-capitalist hybrid revolutions.
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Alif The Unseen
Forced underground when his ex-lover's new fiancee breaches his computer, putting him and his clients in jeopardy, young Arab-Indian hacker and shielder Alif discovers the secret book of the jinn and uses its insights to enable life-threatening developments in information technology. By the creator of the acclaimed comics Air and Vixen.
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The Cold Commands
Relates the story of aging warrior Ringil Eskiath, whose return to the violent life of a hero is further complicated by a major threat that compels Ringil to forge uncomfortable alliances.
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Flight Behavior
Tired of living on a failing farm and suffering oppressive poverty, bored housewife Dellarobia Turnbow, on the way to meet a potential lover, is detoured by a miraculous event on the Appalachian mountainside. It ignites a media and religious firestorm that changes her life forever.NPR Bestseller
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Gone Girl
After a woman disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary, her diary reveals hidden turmoil in her marriage. Her husband, desperate to clear himself of suspicion, realizes that something more disturbing than murder may have occurred.NPR Bestseller
News and Reviews
Dear Life
Stories
A new collection of stories by the author of The View from Castle Rock illuminates moments that shape a life — from a dream or a sexual act to simple twists of fate — and is set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron.NPR Bestseller
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The Casual Vacancy
The early death of a small-town councilman reveals deep-rooted conflicts in the seemingly idyllic community of Pagford, which rapidly deteriorates in the face of cultural disputes, generation clashes and a volatile election.NPR Bestseller
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Sweet Tooth
Recruited into MI5 against a backdrop of the Cold War in 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome, a compulsive reader, is assigned to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer whose politics align with those of the government.NPR Bestseller
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Bring Up The Bodies
The spark has gone out of Henry VIII's second marriage. When his roving eye leaves Anne Boleyn and begins to settle on Jane Seymour, another woman at court, the monarch turns to his chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell, for help. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies is the second book in a planned trilogy about Cromwell.NPR Bestseller
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Telegraph Avenue
Two longtime friends and bandmates are co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl. Their wives are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives. When an ex–NFL quarterback announces plans to build his latest megastore nearby, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their little enterprise. Meanwhile, their wives also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence.NPR Bestseller
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The Yellow Birds
In Al Tafar, Iraq, 21-year-old Pvt. John Bartle and 18-year-old Pvt. Daniel Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. The two men do all they can to protect each other from the forces that are pressing in: the insurgents, physical fatigue and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined.NPR Bestseller
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Life Of Pi
After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan, a 450-pound Bengal tiger and Pi, a 16-year-old Indian boy. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary fiction of recent years.NPR Bestseller, Literary Award Winner
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The Paris Wife
The Paris Wife follows the life of Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, as she navigates 1920s Paris.NPR Bestseller
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Wolf Hall
Assuming the power recently lost by the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell counsels a mercurial Henry VIII on the latter's efforts to marry Anne Boleyn against the wishes of Rome, a successful endeavor that comes with a dangerous price.NPR Bestseller, Literary Award Winner
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Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell, author of Number9Dream, recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a 19th century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.NPR Bestseller
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Fifty Shades Of Grey
Growing out of a piece of fan fiction that recast Twilight's Bella and Edward in sexier scenarios, Fifty Shades of Grey tells the steamy affair of a student journalist and an intriguing young entrepreneur.NPR Bestseller
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State Of Wonder
A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh must step out of her comfort zone when she is sent into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years — a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.NPR Bestseller
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The Sense Of An Ending
Tony Webster is a retired divorced man in his mid-60s who, after receiving notice of an unexpected bequest, is pulled back into a "powerful recollection of strong emotions" from his past. This leads to a reassessment of the accuracy of his memories, a rueful realization of how much he'd gotten wrong, and a harsh re-evaluation of his passive approach to life.NPR Bestseller, Literary Award Winner
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The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
In a thought-provoking, coming-of-age novel, teenager Charlie struggles to cope with the complex world of high school. He deals with the confusions of sex and love, the temptations of drugs and the pain of losing a close friend and favorite aunt.NPR Bestseller
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The Snow Child
A childless couple working on a farm in the brutal landscape of 1920 Alaska discover a little girl living in the wilderness with a red fox and begin to love the strange, almost supernatural child as their own.NPR Bestseller
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The Night Circus
Waging a fierce competition for which they have trained since childhood, circus magicians Celia and Marco unexpectedly fall in love and share a fantastical romance that manifests in fateful ways.NPR Bestseller
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The Language Of Flowers
A Novel
Victoria, the orphaned heroine of Vanessa Diffenbaugh's debut novel, is privy to a secret language of flowers that dates to Victorian England.NPR Bestseller
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Rules Of Civility
A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well and a single-minded widow. NPR Bestseller
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The Hobbit
Or There And Back Again
Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return.NPR Bestseller
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The Art of Fielding
A baseball star at a small college near Lake Michigan launches a routine throw that goes disastrously off course and inadvertently changes the lives of five people, including the college president, a gay teammate and the president's daughter.NPR Bestseller
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The Marriage Plot
Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while an old friend resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.NPR Bestseller
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The Children of Men
In 2021, with the human race becoming extinct because of the infertility of all males, Oxford historian Theodore Faron is drawn into the schemes of an unlikely group of revolutionaries out to save society. Reissue. (A Universal Pictures/Strike Entertainment film, releasing December 2006, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Charlie Hunnam, Michael Caine, & Chiwetel Ejiofor) (Science Fiction)
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The Fortunes of Love
The rich and handsome Duke of Strathavon has come to Bath to reside and seek a bride. He has the ladies of Bath all agog — but not the beautiful and spirited Davinia Sinclair, who is neither charmed nor overawed by the impressive Duke.
News and Reviews
The Stonecutter
The mysterious drowning of a little girl threatens to tear apart the resort town of Fjallbacka, as Patrik Hedstrom's investigation begins to uncover dark secrets of past generations.
News and Reviews
Broken Harbor
In the aftermath of a brutal attack that left a woman in intensive care and her husband and young children dead, brash cop Scorcher Kennedy and his rookie partner, Richie, struggle with perplexing clues and Scorcher's haunting memories of a shattering incident from his childhood.NPR Bestseller
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The Beautiful Mystery
A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel
When a peaceful monastery in Quebec is shattered by the murder of its renowned choir director, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir of the Surete du Quebec are challenged to find the killer in a cloistered community that has taken a vow of silence.NPR Bestseller
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Gaudy Night
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The Red Pyramid
Egyptologist Dr. Julius Kane accidentally unleashes the Egyptian god Set, who banishes the doctor to oblivion and forces his two children to embark on a dangerous journey to save him.
