"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," writes Tolstoy in his literary masterpiece Anna Karenina. Commonly regarded as one of the greatest realist novels ever written, Tolstoy himself saw it as his first true novel. The novel was not well received by critics when first published, but Tolstoy's fellow Russian greats all considered it a great work of art.
Showing 1 - 20 of 98
There are a total of 105 valid entries on the list.
Author:
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
"Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist ... Even though she knows they'll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with four books he would like to buy--two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming....
Author:
Average Rating:
3.9 stars
Description:
"Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control"--
Author:
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
Author:
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member--including Addie--and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life.
5. Becoming
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Michelle Obama describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private in a deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations.
Author:
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
Imbolo Mbue's debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream tells the story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy.
Author:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He's also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental...
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Formats:
Description:
"Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy when beholding beauty. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death--bitter and sweet--are forever paired. A song in a minor key, an elegiac poem, or even a touching television commercial all can bring us to this sublime, even holy, state of mind--and, ultimately, to greater kinship with our fellow humans....
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
After her passionate marriage deteriorates into a violent nightmare, Fran Benedetto is forced to start a new life, complete with a new identity.
Author:
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
11. The book of Ruth
Author:
Average Rating:
4.7 stars
Description:
Ruth, a young woman living in a rural Illinois town, looks back on the people who have shaped her life, including her runaway father, shrewish mother, and crazy husband
12. Cane River
Author:
Series:
Tademy family chronicles volume 1.
Average Rating:
4.3 stars
Description:
Follows four generations of African American women from slavery to the early twentieth century as they struggle for economic security and the future of their families along the Cane River in rural Louisiana.
Author:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"In this ... Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate....
14. The corrections
Author:
Average Rating:
3.1 stars
Description:
Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he begins to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson's disease.
Author:
Average Rating:
4.1 stars
Description:
"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret. The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and...
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
A novel depicting the racial ferment in the beautiful country of South Africa in 1948
Author:
Average Rating:
3.3 stars
Description:
A Chilean woman searches for her lover in the goldfields of 1840s California. Arriving as a stowaway, Eliza finances her search with various jobs, including playing the piano in a brothel.
18. Deacon King Kong
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"From James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, comes a wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting. In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .45 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this...
Author:
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
The disappearance of her three-year-old son Ben threatens to drive a wedge between Beth Cappadora and her husband, Pat, and transforms her older son into a troubled delinquent, until one day nine years later when Ben comes back into their lives
Author:
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.