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Maureen's All-Time Favorites |
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Click on any title or cover to find the item in the SWAN Online Catalog.
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
The lives of fifty-four-year-old concierge Rene Michel and extremely bright, suicidal twelve-year-old Paloma Josse are transformed by the arrival of a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu.
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Year of Wonders : a novel of the plague
by Geraldine Brooks
Young Anna Frith, a vicar's maid, is faced with the loss of her family, the disintegration of her local community, and a passionate, illicit love as she and her village confront the horrors of the plague, in a historical novel based on real-life events in seventeenth-century England. A first novel.
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Tell the Wolves I'm home : a novel
by Carol Rifka Brunt
Her world upended by the death of a beloved artist uncle who was the only person who understood her, fourteen-year-old June is mailed a teapot by her uncle's grieving friend, with whom June forges a poignant relationship.
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The Great Santini
by Pat Conroy
Eighteen-year-old Ben's attempts to stand up for himself, his mother, and his sister are resisted by his intolerant father, a fighter pilot and inflexible disciplinarian.
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The Whistling Season
by Ivan Doig
Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent and perpetually whistling Rose and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's reluctant sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project.
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Hunting and Gathering
by Anna Gavalda
Four Parisians--including a starving artist, her shy and aristocratic neighbor, the neighbor's obnoxious but talented roommate, and a neglected grandmother--share unexpected twists of fate that connect them to one another. By the author of Someone I Loved.
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The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
by Barbara Kingsolver
In 1959, Nathan Price, a evangelical Baptist who has taken his wife and four daughters on a mission to the Belgian Congo, finds that their traditions are no longer secure in this very different world, in a powerful story set against the backdrop of the Congo's battle for independence from Belgium.
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The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
by Dinaw Mengestu
Seventeen years after fleeing the Ethiopian revolution to America, Sepha Stephanos runs a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where he witnesses a series of racially charged incidents and bitterly reflects on his past and the differences between his actual prospects and the life he imagined. A first novel.
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A Fine Balance : a novel
by Rohinton Mistry
In India during the mid-1970s, after a "state of internal emergency" is declared, four very different people--a widowed seamstress, a student, and a man and his nephew who have fled their village's caste violence--find their lives becoming inextricably intertwined.
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The Tender Bar : a memoir
by J. R. Moehringer
A vivid memoir of growing up and coming of age with a single mother describes how the author received valuable life lessons and friendship at the neighborhood bar, an old-time New York saloon populated by a colorful assortment of characters who provided him with a kind of fatherhood by committee.
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Me Before You
by Jojo Moyes
Taking a job as an assistant to extreme sports enthusiast Will, who is wheelchair bound after a motorcycle accident, Louisa struggles with her employer's acerbic moods and learns of his shocking plans before demonstrating to him that life is still worth living. By the author of The Last Letter from Your Lover.
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The Death of Bees : a novel
by Lisa O'Donnell
Trying to keep the death of their parents a secret, Marnie and her little sister Nelly are on their own until several residents in Glasgow's Hazelhurst housing estate suspect that something is not right.
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My Dream of You
by Nuala O'Faolain
As Kathleen de Burca, an Irish travel writer based in London, faces the realities of a milestone birthday, she sets out for Ireland to discover the truth about a scandalous love affair that took place between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant during the potato famine and uncovers not only the complex mysteries of love but also a fateful decision that could change her own life forever.
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Bel Canto : a novel
by Ann Patchett
When terrorists seize hostages at an embassy party, an unlikely assortment of people is thrown together, including American opera star Roxanne Coss, and Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese CEO and her biggest fan.
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Cost
by Roxana Robinson
Settling into her parents' home in Maine in the hopes of helping them with their respective health challenges, art professor Julie Lambert is shattered by the discovery of her son's heroin addiction, a situation for which mother and son receive help from multiple family members.
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Cutting for Stone : a novel
by A. Verghese
The twin sons of a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone are orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and father's disappearance, coming of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, bound together by a shared interest in medicine and forever divided by their love for the same woman. A first novel.
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The Paying Guests
by Sarah Waters
Forced to take in lodgers in economically challenged 1922 South London, widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter find their lives profoundly and disturbingly changed by the arrival of a modern young couple. By the best-selling author of The Little Stranger.
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