Anansi boys
Neil Gaiman
When Fat Charlie's dad named something, it stuck. Like calling Fat Charlie "Fat Charlie." Even now, twenty years later, Charlie Nancy can't shake that name, one of the many embarrassing "gifts" his father bestowed - before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie's life.
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As simple as snow
Gregory Galloway
t is said that Anna (Anastasia) Cayne was born in a thunderstorm. A slightly spooky and complicated high school girl with a penchant for riddles, shortwave radios, Houdini tricks, and ghost stories, Anna spends much of her time writing obituaries for every living person in town.
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Black Swan Green
David Mitchell
A meditative novel of a young boy on the cusp of adulthood follows a single year (1982) in the life of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor as he grows up in what is for him the sleepiest village in Worcestershire, England.
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Book of Lost Things
John Connolly
Taking refuge in fairy tales after the loss of his mother, twelve-year-old David finds himself violently propelled into an imaginary land in which the boundaries of fantasy and reality are disturbingly melded.
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Children's War
Monique Charlesworth
Interweaving the stories of Ilse, a half-Jewish girl, and Nicolai, a Hitler Youth, "The Children's War" is a gripping, unforgettable story of growing up in a world gone mad.
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Color of the Sea
John Hamamura

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Crow Lake
Mary Lawson
For the farming Pye family of northern Ontario, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur offstage. In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control.
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Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
Narrated by a 15-year-old autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, this dazzling novel weaves together an old-fashioned mystery, a contemporary coming-of-age story and a fascinating excursion into a mind incapable of processing emotions.
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Daughter of the Forest
Juliet Marillier
Sorcha, the seventh child and only daughter, is alone destined to defend her family and protect her land from a clan of the Britons.
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Dear Zoe
Philip Beard
After Zoe's death on September 11, 2001, Tess's family is numbed by their personal tragedy. Not Since "The Lovely Bones" has there been a study of grief, adolescence, and healing that rings as true.
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Ender's Shadow
Orson Scott. Card
Bean, an orphan living on the streets, finds himself plucked from desperate straits and placed in Battle School, where his tactical skills earn him respect and a role with Ender Wiggin in battle.
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Oscar searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that interwines with the stories of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden.
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Eyre Affair
Jasper Fforde
Based on an imaginary world where time and reality bend in the most convincing and original way since "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Eyre Affair" is a an endlessly inventive caper unlike any other.
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Floor of the Sky
Pamela Carter Joern
The inner worlds of characters isolated by geography and habit are revealed in this novel. Set in the Nebraska Sandhills, this book is about an aging widow on the verge of losing her family’s ranch and her sixteen-year-old pregnant granddaughter who visits her for the summer.
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Gabriel's Story
David Anthony Durham
The old West, both beautiful and brutal, is the setting of Durham's magnificently realized debut novel, a classic coming-of-age story of an African-American boy.
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Girl With the Pearl Earring
Tracy Chevalier
"Girl with a Pearl Earring" paints a vivid portrait of colorful 17th-century Delft, as well as the hauntingly poignant story of one young girl's rite of passage.
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Imani All Mine
Connie Rose Porter
In the eagerly anticipated new novel from the acclaimed author of "All Bright Court", the unwed mother of a baby girl narrates, in her lyrical, street-smart voice, her progress on her journey to adulthood in an increasingly violent world.
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Kit's Law
Donna Morrissey
Kit Pitman lives with her unstable mother in a cottage on the outer banks of Newfoundland. Her life is compounded by the mystery that surrounds her illegitimate birth.
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Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, takes readers from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present.
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Long Way Down
Nick Hornby
Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own morality. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.
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Maisie Dobbs
Jaqueline Winspear
Meet Maisie Dobbs, who in 1929 launches her career as a private investigator and finds herself drawn back to the Great War she thought she'd long since put behind her.
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Man Who Ate the 747
Ben Sherwood
Alumbering introvert farmer, Wally Chubb, is on a mission to prove his love for Superior's sassy newspaper editor, Willa Wyatt. His plan: to consume an entire Boeing 747, ground into grit.
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Midnight at the Dragon Cafe
Judy Fong Bates
Su-Jen Chou, the only daughter of parents who flee Communist China in the 1950s to become proprietors of a Chinese restaurant in an isolated Ontario town, watches as her family unravels.
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Motherland
Vineeta Vijayaraghavan
An American teenager spends the summer with her relatives in southern India and gains new insight into her past, her family and her heritage.
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My Jim
Nancy Rawles
A spare and beautiful meditation on love and loss, this novel follows the life of Sadie, the abandoned wife of the escaped slave Jim from Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
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My Sister's Keeper
Jodi Picoult
Thirteen-year-old Anna Fitzgerald walks into the office of lawyer Campbell Alexander and announces she wants to sue her parents for the rights to her own body.
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Necessary Beggar
Susan Palwick
In the Glorious City of Lémabantunk, a young man is found guilty of murder, and his punishment is exile along with his whole family to another world from which they can never return. Their new home is Earth, where they are considered refugees who must begin their lives anew.
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Pardonable Lies: a Maisie Dobbs novel
Jacqueline Winspear
Maisie Dobbs "psychologist and investigator" gets involved in three cases: proving the innocence of a 13-year-old farm girl, Avril Jarvis, accused of murder; undertaking a search for Sir Cecil Lawton's only son, a pilot shot down behind enemy lines in WWI, whose body was never recovered; and looking into the circumstances of the death of her university friend Priscilla Evernden Partridge's brother in France during the war.
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Peace Like the River
Leif Enger
Through the voice of 11-year-old Reuben Land, an asthmatic boy obsessed with cowboys living in 1960s Minnesota, the story is told of the Land family's cross-country search for Reuben's outlaw older brother, who has been charged with murder.
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River, Cross My Heart
Breena Clarke
Eight-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of an apparently haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. Clara's sister, twelve-year-old Johnnie Mae, must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions sparked by her sister's death as she struggles to decide and discover the kind of woman she will become.
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Sand-Reckoner
Gillian Bradshaw
Archimedes, a brilliant young man who is blessed by all the Muses and who experiences fame and loss, love and war, wealth and betrayal--none of which affects him nearly as much as the divine beauty of mathematics.
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Stardust
Neil Gaiman
Young Tristan Thorn vows to retrieve a fallen star to win the hand of beautiful Victoria Forester. In his search, Tristan is propelled into a strange world where fallen stars come in many guises.
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Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield

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Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
Henry De Tamble is a Chicago librarian: at random times, he suddenly disappears without warning and finds himself in the past or future having contact with his wife, Clare. The book alternates between Henry and Clare's point of view, and so does the narration.
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Upstate
Kalisha Buckhanon
Antonio and Natasha, two Harlem teenagers, are deeply in love with each other, but their relationship is put to the test when Antonio goes to jail just before their senior year for killing his father, a crime he may or may not have committed.
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Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen
Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant who gave them hope.
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When the Emperor Was Divine
Julie Otsuka
A portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any previously written--a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times.
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Whistling Season
Ivan Doig
Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900’s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent Rose and her brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower’s sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project.
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World Made Straight
Ron Rash
In an Appalachian community haunted by the dark legacy of a Civil War massacre, young Travis Shelton struggles to overcome the corruption of the present and the dark influence of Carlton Toomey, a local marijuana grower.
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Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
Geraldine Brooks
A young woman comes of age during an extraordinary year of love and death as she and her community are tested by one of the greatest catastrophes ever to befall England. This gripping historical novel is based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village", in the rugged mountain spine of England in 1666.
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