NCW Libraries

"Spurred on by nineties "family values" campaigns and determined to better herself through education, a teen mom talks her way into college. Disgusted by an overabundance of phallocratic narratives and Freytag's pyramid, she turns to a subcultural canon of resistance and failure. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, it documents the survival of a demonized single mother figuring things out"-- "In this novel, Ariel Gore is a teen mom, aspiring...

"Against the backdrop of America's heartland, this stunning epic drama follows the Kusek family over fifty years, through relocation from metropolis to prairie, the panic of Communism and McCarthyism, a smear campaign, a dramatic trial, and, ultimately, murder. On Christmas Eve, 1985, Jo Kusek discovers her brother and his family have been savagely attacked. The wife has been killed, father and son barely alive. How did this happen? Cal, Jo's father,...

Ward (Salvage the Bones) tells the story of three generations of a struggling Mississippi family in this astonishing novel. "We don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once." This is the explanation 13-year-old Jojo is provided by his grandmother, the family matriarch, on her deathbed. "I'll be on the other side of the door," she reassures him, "With everybody else that's gone before." Jojo and his little...

"A thrilling, sexy coming-of-age story exploring toxic love, ruthless ambition, and shocking betrayal, Tell Me Lies is about that one person who still haunts you--the other one. The wrong one. The one you couldn't let go of. The one you'll never forget. Lucy Albright is far from her Long Island upbringing when she arrives on the campus of her small California college, and happy to be hundreds of miles from her mother, whom she's never forgiven for...

""Powerful, haunting, and beautiful," (M.R. Carey, author of The Girl With All the Gifts) The Ship is a luminous and genre-defying debut novel that follows a young woman's coming of age in a world where she has no future. London burned for three weeks. And then it got worse ... Lalla has grown up sheltered from the chaos amid the ruins of civilization. But things are getting more dangerous outside. People are killing each other for husks of bread,...

"From the internationally bestselling author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, a heartfelt coming-of-age story that Karen Joy Fowler calls "a timeless classic book you will read and reread." Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. Content to spend her days planning capers with her brother William, competing with her brainy cousin Amanda,...

"In the tradition of EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU, and with echoes of OLIVE KITTERIDGE, comes a stunning debut from Bryn Chancellor, an award-winning writer hailed as "amazing, sensitive, and thoughtful" by Kevin Wilson"-- Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore's...

"In 1919, the four Turner sisters and their parents are barely scraping along. Their father is a low-paid boot stitcher in Johnson City, NY, and the Turners are always one paycheck away from eviction. When their father's hand is crushed and he's forced to quit, their domineering mother decides that the vaudeville stage is their best--and only--chance for salvation. With everything at stake, the Tumbling Turners take to the road and the four young...

"For fans of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a propulsive literary novel about sexual obsession in which a meek Harvard freshman becomes dangerously infatuated with a classmate. David Federman has never felt appreciated. One of the most painfully forgettable members of his New Jersey high school class--yet the only one accepted to Harvard--shy, witty David arrives in Cambridge fully expecting to embrace, and be welcomed by, a new tribe of like-minded...

"From the author of The Calligrapher's Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart"--