20th century 
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There are a total of 409 valid entries on the list.
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"The epic road trips-and surprising friendship-of John Burroughs, nineteenth-century naturalist, and Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, inventors of the modern age"--
2. Aria
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"Iran in the 1950s is wealthy in oil but riven by divisions of class, ethnicity, and religion, and its corrupt government is under foreign influence. At this volatile moment, an illiterate driver rescues a redheaded, blue-eyed baby girl who has been abandoned in a Tehran alley and names her Aria. When he can no longer care for her, he finds her a new home, setting her on an unlikely path from extreme deprivation to a life of privilege. Along the way,...
3. Bibliolepsy
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"Gina Apostol's debut novel, available for the first time in the US, tells of a young woman caught between a lifelong desire to escape into books and a real-world revolution. It is the mid-eighties, two decades into the kleptocratic, brutal rule of Ferdinand Marcos. The Philippine economy is in deep recession, and civil unrest is growing by the day. But Primi Peregrino has her own priorities: tracking down books and pursuing romantic connections with...
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5 stars
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"The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists...
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"Southern California, 1960s: endless sunny days surfing in Malibu, followed by glittering neon nights at Whisky A-Go-Go. In an era when women are expected to be housewives, Carol Donelly is breaking the mold as a legendary female surfer struggling to compete in a male-dominated sport--and her daughters, Mindy and Ginger, bear the weight of her unconventional lifestyle. The Donnelly sisters grow up enduring their mother's absence--physically, when...
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"In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool ... against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its...
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5 stars
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"1914, Fiji: 25-year-old police sergeant Akal Singh would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise. After a promising start to his career in his native India and in Hong Kong, he got sent to work in Fiji as punishment for a professional mistake he's too embarrassed to talk about. Lonely and humiliated, Akal longs for the day he can finally solve a big case and win the inspector-general's favor, thereby redeeming himself and being permitted to...
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2 stars
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"Alvin Hall set out to revisit the world of the Green Book to instruct us all on the real history of the guide that saved many lives. With his friend Janée Woods Weber, he drove from New York to Detroit to New Orleans, visiting motels, restaurants, shops, and stores where Black Americans once found a friendly welcome. They explored historical and cultural landmarks, from the theatres and clubs where stars like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne performed...
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4.2 stars
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"In all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight.this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility." - Kirkus Reviews (starred) From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility--a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel With his breakout debut novel, Rules of Civility, Amor Towles established...
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4.7 stars
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"The Bahamas, 1941. Newly-widowed Leonora "Lulu" Randolph arrives in the Bahamas to investigate the Governor and his wife for a New York society magazine. After all, American readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarch to its knees five years earlier. What more intriguing backdrop for their romance than a wartime Caribbean paradise, a colonial...
11. Horizon
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"In the tradition of Katherine Boo and Tracy Kidder, The Hungry Season is 'a deeply reported story of aspiration and desperation' (Kirkus Reviews, starred review): a nonfiction drama that 'reads like the best of fiction' (Mark Arax), tracing one woman's journey from the mist-covered mountains of Laos to the sunbaked flatlands of Fresno, California, as she struggles to overcome the wounds inflicted by war and family alike'--
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"As a child living in his family's apple orchard, Ahmad Torkash-Vand treasures his great-great-great-great grandfather's every mesmerizing word day of his father's death, Ahmad listens closely as the seemingly immortal elder tells him the tale of a centuries-old family curse . . . and the boy's own fated role in the story. Ahmad grows up to suspect that something must be interfering with his family, as he struggles to hold them together through decades...
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"Memoir by Ursula Pike (Karuk) of her time serving with the Peace Corps in Bolivia. Focusing on international travel from a California Indian perspective, the memoir asks what it means to be both colonizer and colonized, and inquires into the challenges of building relationships between Indigenous groups from very different places"--
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3.8 stars
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"The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds -- Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s -- and whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century's most tumultuous events"--Provided by publisher.
Harrison William Shepherd, a highly observant writer, is caught between two worlds--in Mexico, working for communists Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, and later in America,...
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Average Rating:
5 stars
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"A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa's greatest houses--and the lives of its occupants"--
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2 stars
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A "novel that circumnavigates 1954 Australia, revealing as much about the country-continent as it does about three audacious individuals who take part in the infamous 10,000 mile race, the Redex Trial. Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in southeastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired...
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3.1 stars
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"In 1937, twenty-eight-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in the devastating conflict. It's the adventure she's been looking for and her chance to prove herself a worthy journalist in a field dominated by men. But she also finds herself unexpectedly--and uncontrollably--falling in love with Hemingway, a man on his way to becoming...
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"In an engaging and anecdotal social history, Maiden Voyages explores how women's lives were transformed by the Golden Age of ocean liner travel between Europe and North America. During the early twentieth century, transatlantic travel was the province of the great ocean liners. It was an extraordinary undertaking made by many women, whose lives were transformed by their journeys between the Old World and the New. Some travelled for leisure, some...
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"Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as the Old Musician and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of unfathomable violence live side by side, striving...