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  The Crimson Petal and the White...

  Michel Faber

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  A teenage prostitute ascends through the many layers of Victorian London society in this highly acclaimed “big, sexy, bravura a novel” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times).  London, 1870s. At the heart of this panoramic narrative is a young woman’s struggle to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Sugar, a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for a better life. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society begins with the egotistical perfume magnate William Rackham. Infatuated with Sugar, William’s patronage brings her into the circles of his family and milieu: his wife who barely overcomes chronic hysteria to make her appearances during “the Season”; his mysteriously hidden-away daughter, left to the care of minions; his pious brother, foiled in his devotional calling by his lust for the Widow Fox; as well as preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthy servants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes and persuasions.   Twenty years in its conception, research, and writing, The Crimson Petal and the White is teeming with life, rich in texture and incident, with breathtakingly real characters. "Cocky and brilliant, amused and angry, [Faber] is rightfully earning comparisons to observer extraordinaire Charles Dickens. . . . It's hopeless to resist" (Entertainment Weekly).

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  The Plum Tree

  Ellen Marie Wiseman

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  "Bloom where you're planted," is the advice Christine Bolz receives from her beloved Oma. But seventeen-year-old domestic Christine knows there is a whole world waiting beyond her small German village. It's a world she's begun to glimpse through music, books-and through Isaac Bauerman, the cultured son of the wealthy Jewish family she works for.Yet the future she and Isaac dream of sharing faces greater challenges than their difference in stations. In the fall of 1938, Germany is changing rapidly under Hitler's regime. Anti-Jewish posters are everywhere, dissenting talk is silenced, and a new law forbids Christine from returning to her job-and from having any relationship with Isaac. In the months and years that follow, Christine will confront the Gestapo's wrath and the horrors of Dachau, desperate to be with the man she loves, to survive-and finally, to speak out.Set against the backdrop of the German homefront, this is an unforgettable novel of courage and resolve, of the inhumanity of war, and the heartbreak and hope left in its wake.

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  The Women's War - Mountain Women...

  Carol Ervin

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  In 1918, Winkler explodes from a community of thirteen helpful souls to a crowded coal mining town of strangers with divided loyalties. War in faraway Europe means more money in the pockets of May Rose and her friends, but as a new wife and mother she feels cut off from people and community events. And though mine owners like her husband are making money hand over fist, the workers' poverty and resentment threaten trouble when the war ends. Before that happens, the town will be struck by an epidemic, and May Rose and the women who've helped each other through desperate times will face challenges as divisive and deadly as war.

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  Falling to Earth

  Kate Southwood

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  A “poignant [and] powerful” novel about a 1920s Midwestern community in the aftermath of a devastating tornado (The New Yorker). 
   
  In March 1925, the worst tornado in the nation’s history will descend without warning on the small town of Marah, Illinois. By nightfall, hundreds will be homeless and hundreds more will lie in the streets, dead or grievously injured. Only one man, Paul Graves, will still have everything he started the day with—his family, his home, and his business, all miraculously intact. 
   
  This “absolutely gorgeous” novel follows Paul Graves and his young family in the year after the storm as they struggle to comprehend their own fate and that of their devastated town (The New York Times). They watch helplessly as Marah tries to resurrect itself from the ruins and as their friends and neighbors begin to wonder how one family, and only one, could be exempt from terrible misfortune. As the town begins to recover, the family miscalculates the growing resentment and hostility around them with tragic results, in an “extraordinarily moving” portrayal of survivor’s guilt and the frenzy of bereavement following a disaster (Financial Times). 
   
  “All the big themes are here—chance, fate, loyalty, revenge, guilt, jealousy . . . Inspired by actual events surrounding the 1925 Tri-State tornado, the worst in U.S. history, Southwood’s poignantly penetrating examination of the psychic cost of survival is breathtaking in its depth of understanding.” —Booklist (starred review) 
   
  “What’s most exciting about Southwood’s debut is her prose, which is reminiscent of Willa Cather’s in its ability to condense the large, ineffable melancholy of the plains into razor-sharp images.” —The Daily Beast

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  The Deadly Hours

  Susanna Kearsley, C.S. Harris,...

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  From Italy in 1733 to Edinburgh in 1831 to a series of chilling murders in London in 1870 and a lethal game of revenge decades later, a watch touches lives with misfortune—until it comes into the hands of one young woman who might be able to stop it for good.This outstanding collaboration between four outstanding novelists follows characters who are irrevocably linked by fate, each one playing a key role in breaking the curse once and for all.

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  Long Walk to Water - Based on a...

  Linda Sue Park

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  Audie Award Finalist, Children's Titles for Ages 8-12, 2014
  
  In 1985 southern Sudan is ravaged by war. Rebels and government forces battle for control, with ordinary people...people like the boy, Salva Dut...caught in the middle. When Salva's village is attacked, he must embark on a harrowing journey that will propel him through horror and heartbreak, across a harsh desert, and into a strange new life.
  
  Years later, in contemporary South Sudan, a girl named Nya must walk eight hours a day to fetch water. The walk is grueling, but there is unexpected hope. How these two stories intersect is told in this fascinating dual narrative, performed by David Baker and Cynthia Bishop, with the assistance of dialect coach James Achueil...who actually made the same journey across Africa when he was one of the "Lost Boys of the Sudan."
  
  ©2010 Linda Sue Park (P)2013 Full Cast Audio

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