Marilynne Robinson

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER• OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER• A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • MORE THAN 1 MILLION COPIES SOLD

“Quietly powerful [and] moving.” O, The Oprah Magazine (recommended reading)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, GILEAD is a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

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 Iowan 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: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle.

Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And 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.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Michigan

Gilead

a968550f-3049-4806-8023-02f9a73d4f2a-1

Elizabeth Strout

novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown— and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart. 

With her trademark spare, crystalline prose-a voice infused with "intimate, fragile, desperate human-ness" (The Washington Post) - Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic. As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband, Wil-liam. For the next several months, it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. 

Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart —the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that follows the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.

Illinois

A Novel

From Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout comes a poignant, pitch-perfect novel about a divorced couple stuck together during lockdown--and the love, loss, despair, and hope that animate us even as the world seems to be falling apart.

With her trademark spare, crystalline prose--a voice infused with "intimate, fragile, desperate humanness" (The Washington Post)--Elizabeth Strout turns her exquisitely tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, following the indomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton through the early days of the pandemic.

As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea.

Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we're apart--the pain of a beloved daughter's suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.

Lucy by the Sea

694e9eb4-3974-42fb-af07-49c609e85ce5-1

Texas

Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career with the Ziegfeld Follies, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a nightclub, she chances to meet Dexter Styles again, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have vanished"--

Manhattan Beach

a15b5311-bdf1-4073-95fe-31cb6aac6859-1

#hardcover #suspensethrillers #jenniferegan #pulitzerprize 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Vermont

A Pulitzer Prizewinning columnist offers a fictional exploration of America's early political scandals as James Thomson Callander, a muckraking journalist secretly working for Thomas Jefferson, becomes unhappy with Jefferson and reveals his affair with the enslaved Sally Hemings.

Scandalmonger

ee9c1aee-8528-4498-b593-663b8d9c0fb3-1

#hardcover #fiction #stories #virginsuicides #jeffreyeugenides #shortstories #pulitzerprize

Virginia

Stories

This collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in "Bronze," a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future.

Fresh Complaint

fb8eb4ed-1d52-48a6-928b-f4dcd775ae75-1

#hardcover #fiction #suspensethrillers #jenniferegan #brooklyn #bookofthemonth #literature #pulitzerprize 

Florida

Colson Whitehead

Connecticut

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men." In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy. Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.

The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

d7932db2-fe89-47c5-b017-eadfb381b5a9-1

David McCullough

New Jersey

Draws on personal correspondence and period diaries to present a history of the American Revolution that ranges from the siege of Boston, to the American defeat at Brooklyn and retreat across New Jersey, to the American victory at Trenton.

1776

b62e3ead-3d0e-4375-941b-ffd947223c46-1

Adam Johnson

The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. By the author of Parasites Like Us.

The Orphan Master's Son

074e747c-e9b5-416c-abf8-f6b14a367098-1

#hardcover #fiction #stories #virginsuicides #shortstories #contemporary #modernliterature #pulitzerprize

Georgia

Katharine Graham

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

The longtime owner of the Washington Post recounts her experiences, including how she rebounded from her husband's suicide to command the Post during Vietnam and Watergate

Personal History (Like New Hardcover)

60e91c6c-f7a6-4651-8de4-b78ff083636e-1

#hardcover #fiction #hours #bynightfall #michaelcunningham #pulitzerprize     Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts - he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston, and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca’s much younger look-alike brother, Ethan (known in the family as Mizzy, "the mistake"), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career - the entire world he has so carefully constructed.

Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.



By Nightfall

9d9dffa4-81ca-47da-b932-c482e573c632-1

First edition hardcover. Never read edition free of any marks or rips/tears. 

North Carolina

"Oprah's Book Club 2016 selection"--Sticker on jacket.

The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club)

f7216fcb-eb32-4aa2-bbb7-d3181b9a5bcb-1

Jennifer Egan

South Carolina

#hardcover #fiction #historical #pulitzerprize #historicalfiction #historicalafricanfiction #adult 

Minnesota

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Fiction

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • The beloved first novel featuring Olive Kitteridge, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Oprah’s Book Club pick Olive, Again “Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her.”—USA Today NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post Book World • USA Today • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Seattle Post-Intelligencer • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Christian Science Monitor • The Plain Dealer • The Atlantic • Rocky Mountain News • Library Journal At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life—sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition—its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. The inspiration for the Emmy Award–winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, and Bill Murray

Olive Kitteridge

e5fa7326-81e0-4dc1-8920-85379420556a-1

Richard Russo

Nebraska

The lives of Jack and Joy Griffin always seem to come back to Cape Cod, where they honeymooned, as they experience the ups and downs of life, including the deaths of Jack's parents, the marriage of their daughter, and Jack and Joy's divorce.

That Old Cape Magic

f76ededc-b700-4cb8-bffa-71aea8b04cbd-1

Oklahoma

David E. Hoffman

A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history The Dead Hand comes the riveting story of a spy who cracked open the Soviet military research establishment and a penetrating portrait of the CIA's Moscow station, an outpost of daring espionage in the last years of the Cold War
 
   While driving out of the American embassy in Moscow on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station heard a knock on his car window. A man on the curb handed him an envelope whose contents stunned U.S. intelligence: details of top-secret Soviet research and developments in military technology that were totally unknown to the United States. In the years that followed, the man, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer in a Soviet military design bureau, used his high-level access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of technical secrets. His revelations allowed America to reshape its weapons systems to defeat Soviet radar on the ground and in the air, giving the United States near total superiority in the skies over Europe.
   One of the most valuable spies to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation with the Soviet Union, Tolkachev took enormous personal risks--but so did the Americans. The CIA had long struggled to recruit and run agents in Moscow, and Tolkachev was a singular breakthrough. Using spy cameras and secret codes as well as face-to-face meetings in parks and on street corners, Tolkachev and his handlers succeeded for years in eluding the feared KGB in its own backyard, until the day came when a shocking betrayal put them all at risk. 
   Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA and on interviews with participants, David Hoffman has created an unprecedented and poignant portrait of Tolkachev, a man motivated by the depredations of the Soviet state to master the craft of spying against his own country. Stirring, unpredictable, and at times unbearably tense, The Billion Dollar Spy is a brilliant feat of reporting that unfolds like an espionage thriller.

The Billion Dollar Spy

e578e1e0-0ee1-48a5-9d07-8b8c892c4935-1

Frank McCourt

Tennessee

A Memoir

The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies

Angela's Ashes

27680489-af28-494f-b4dd-c0e4e5802eeb-1

Annie Proulx

The highly acclaimed author of Postcards shifts her focus from literary criticism to a fishing town in Newfoundland, in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life--an elderly aunt and two young daughters--who undergo striking changes when they decide to resettle in their ancestral coastal home.

The Shipping News

af410369-d305-4a80-a406-3c20827a40cc-1

#hardcover #nonfiction #cleopatra #pulitzerprize #biography #epic #alluring #history  #romance #bestseller

A Life

Cleopatra

43b9cad8-0557-447f-ab3e-394b63f80309-1

First Edition!

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. • The basis for the acclaimed original Amazon Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him.

In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.

As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. 



Browse by categories

Save this search

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead

Elizabeth Strout

Lucy by the Sea

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

William Safire

Scandalmonger

Jeffrey Eugenides

Fresh Complaint

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

David McCullough

1776

Adam Johnson

The Orphan Master's Son

Jeffrey Eugenides

Fresh Complaint

Katharine Graham

Personal History (Like New Hardcover)

Michael Cunningham

By Nightfall

Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club)

Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach

Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club)

Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge

Richard Russo

That Old Cape Magic

Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge

David E. Hoffman

The Billion Dollar Spy

Frank McCourt

Angela's Ashes

Annie Proulx

The Shipping News

Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra

Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club)