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Lisa Wardein Roberts
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The Feast of Love
Charles Baxter
James Mustich
Set in Ann Arbor, Michigan, The Feast of Love relates the intertwining yet wildly divergent stories of several men and women who range across the generations and yet are pulled together, apart, and together again by strands of desire, sex, marriage, pain, and plain old human sympathy. With a sleight...show more
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The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was an intrepid pilot, a pioneer in the early days of commercial aviation who flew mail routes and, later, military reconnaissance missions for the Allies until his plane disappeared in 1944 off the coast of Marseille. During his lifetime, Saint-Exupéry also earned an intern...show more
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
Addie Bundren’s health is deteriorating rapidly, and her eldest son, Cash, is hewing the most beautiful coffin he can manage right outside her bedroom window. Wretchedly poor, the Bundrens watch Addie die, then make their way with her corpse, its coffin in a mule-drawn wagon, across the fictional Yo...show more
Middlemarch
George Eliot
At the center of George Eliot’s vast portrait of the provincial city of Middlemarch, its society and inhabitants, is the story of Dorothea Brooke, a “home epic” of a bright, brave young woman learning how to live and what to live for. Most memorable of Middlemarch’s characters, however, is no charac...show more
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A book of shimmering social surfaces and hauntingly evanescent private depths, The Great Gatsby imbues its fleet narrative with a formal elegance that has been readily apparent even to the generations of high school students to whom it has been assigned—generally long before they might understand th...show more
Harriet the Spy
Louise Fitzhugh
Like an outsider Nancy Drew, Fitzhugh’s Harriet has won the esteem—“allegiance” is probably a better word—of countless young girls who’ve mimicked her notetaking (as well as her unwavering love for tomato sandwiches). She is, in a word, beloved, most likely because her stance apart—as writer, as spy...show more
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Gone Girl is the story of a marriage’s unraveling and the suspicion that falls on the husband in the wake of his wife’s disappearance. But it is author Gillian Flynn’s knowing exploitation of the intimate pact between writer and reader, her head-turning violation of it, that tightens the story's gri...show more
Johnny Tremain
Esther Forbes
Enlivening already thrilling historical events with vivid characters and page-turning drama, Esther Forbes’s novel of the American Revolution—and of Johnny Tremain’s personal and political adventures in the shadow of the looming rebellion—has remained a favorite of young readers for decades. Peopled...show more
Flour Water Salt Yeast
Ken Forkish
Beginning with his discovery, in 1995, of an article about Paris’s legendary Poilâne bakery in Smithsonian magazine, Ken Forkish’s transformation from IBM salesman to one of America’s most celebrated bakers and one of the most successful restaurateurs in Portland, Oregon (where he owns Ken’s Artisan...show more
The Day of the Jackal
Frederick Forsyth
This taut narrative of a 1963 assassination attempt on French president Charles de Gaulle proves that drama, like the devil, is in the details; throughout his intricate chronicle of the techniques and activities of a professional assassin, hired by a homegrown terrorist group incensed by de Gaulle’s...show more
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Published in March 1939, Steinbeck’s saga of the havoc wreaked by the Great Depression was soon the country’s number one bestseller, selling thousands of copies each week despite the difficult economic times. At the same time, communities from coast to coast found it obscene and banned (and even bur...show more
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Vivid, unpredictable, insinuating, uncomfortably intimate, the voice that tells Invisible Man is one of the most supple and powerful instruments ever fashioned in American prose. His skin is black, his soul is blue, his mind is lit with both desperation and deep thought. Naturalistic and surreal, fa...show more
Travels with Charley
John Steinbeck
At age fifty-eight, suffering from a heart condition, John Steinbeck took to the road to say goodbye to the country he loved and to engage one more time with the American themes his imagination had brought to life in his fiction. Travels with Charley is his account of the trip, which took him from N...show more
A Lesson Before Dying
Ernest J. Gaines
It is 1940s Louisiana, and the innocent black man named Jefferson who had the bad luck to be in a store when a white shopkeeper was killed has been falsely charged with robbery and murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. We know how events will turn out, just as the characters do, because inevita...show more
The Spare Room
Helen Garner
The Spare Room chronicles the experience of a novelist named Helen whose Melbourne life is upended when Nicola, an old friend in the final stages of terminal cancer, arrives for an extended visit. Although the book is labeled a novel, the connection between the characters and situations the book des...show more
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Set in Nigeria during the decade culminating in the 1967–70 Biafran war, a secession conflict that left more than a million dead from violence and famine, this story is at once a historical drama and a tale of family struggles and romances gone right and wrong. Half of a Yellow Sun established Adich...show more
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
At the outset of his long, ever-evolving career as a dramatist, Edward Albee was an American heir to the intellectual energies of the European Theater of the Absurd. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, first staged in 1962, Albee moved his ferocity out of the absurd into a more realistic setting, a ...show more
The End of the Affair
Graham Greene
A compelling tapestry of brooding desire, obsessive jealousy, and religious belief, The End of the Affair tells the story of Maurice Bendrix, who, stung by the abrupt end of an affair with a friend’s wife, has hired a private investigator to follow the woman who walked out of his embrace nearly two ...show more
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the second of four daughters of a noted proponent of Transcendentalism, Bronson Alcott. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a friend of the family, as were Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite her transcendentalist pedigree, Louisa May Alcott ...show more
The Firm
John Grisham
There are times in our reading lives when turning the page is more important than what’s on it, when the headlong rush toward what happens next overwhelms reflection—and sometimes even reason. John Grisham has made a career creating plots that deliver just such pleasure to readers. In his writing, G...show more