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Middlemarch
Eliot, George, 1819-1880.
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2003; xxiv, 852 p. ; 20 cm.
It was George Eliot's ambition to create a world and to portray a whole community--tradespeople, middle classes, country gentry--in the rising fictional provincial town of Middlemarch, circa 1830.
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Middlesex
Eugenides, Jeffrey.
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2002; viii, 529 p. ; 24 cm.
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl. In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite. Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
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Miriam's kitchen : a memoir
Ehrlich, Elizabeth.
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1997; xiii, 370 p. ; 24 cm.
Like many American Jews, Elizabeth Ehrlich was ambivalent about her background. She identified with Jewish cultural attitudes, but not with Jewish institutions; she had sentimental memories of her ritually observant grandmothers, but formal religious practice was largely irrelevant to her life. In this warm, funny, moving, and immensely appetizing memoir, she describes how her attitudes evolved, and how she began to bring observance and tradition into her own home.The agent of change was Ehrlich?s mother-in-law, Miriam. A Holocaust survivor, Miriam passionately carried out the traditions she had learned as a girl. Inspired to preserve a lost way of life?and also to ?build a floor? of values, connection, and history beneath her children?s feet?Ehrlich begins cooking lessons with the indomitable Miriam. As Miriam cooks, she speaks of the past and wakes dormant memories and appetites in her skeptical daughter-in-law. With trepidation and a certain amount of backsliding, Ehrlich begins observing Sabbath and moves toward making her kitchen kosher. In the process, she gains a new appreciation of life?s possibilities, choices, and limitations.
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A month in the country
Carr, James Lloyd.
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2000; xxii, 135 p. ; 21 cm.
In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.
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Mountains beyond mountains
Kidder, Tracy.
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2003; 317 p. ; 24 cm.
"At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard Professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life's calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer - brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti - blasts through convention to get results."--BOOK JACKET.
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The moviegoer.
Percy, Walker, 1916-
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1961; 241 p. 21 cm.
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Mr. Timothy : a novel
Bayard, Louis.
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2003; 384 p. ; 24 cm.
"Mr. Timothy Cratchit has just buried his father. He's also struggling to bury his past as a cripple and shed his financial ties to his benevolent "Uncle" Ebenezer by losing himself in the thick of London's underbelly. He boards at a brothel in exchange for teaching the mistress how to read and spends his nights dredging the Thames for dead bodies and the treasures in their pockets." "Timothy's life takes a sharp turn when he discovers the bodies of two dead girls, each seared with the same cruel brand on the upper arm. The sight of their horror-struck faces compels Timothy to become the protector of another young girl, the enigmatic Philomela. Spurred on by the unwavering enthusiasm of a street-smart, fast-talking homeless boy who calls himself Colin the Melodious, Timothy soon finds that he's on the trail of something far worse - and far more dangerous - than an ordinary killer."--BOOK JACKET.
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Murder in the Marais
Black, Cara, 1951-
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1999; 354 p. ; 20 cm
Aimee Leduc, the intrepid young French-American detective, is hired to investigate the grisly murder of an old Jewish woman in the Marais district of Paris. Her undercover search leads to a neo-Nazi group and requires that she play a dangerous game involving current politics and old war crimes.
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Visage volé : avoir vingt ans ŕ Kaboul
Latifa, 1980-
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2001; 235 p. : 1 map ; 21 cm.
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The namesake
Lahiri, Jhumpa.
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2003; 291 p. ; 22 cm.
Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors the book received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts.An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity. Book jacket.
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The news from Paraguay : a novel
Tuck, Lily, 1938-
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2004; 248 p. : map ; 21 cm.
A historical epic that tells an unusual love story, "The News from Paraguay" offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of 19th-century Paraguay, a largely untouched wilderness where Europeans and North Americans intermingle with both the old Spanish aristocracy and native Guaran' Indians.
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The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948-
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1998; 226 p. ; 22 cm.
"Ramotswe has opened Botswana's first and only detective agency staffed by women. Smith traverses this landscape with an air of simplicity, euphony, and harmony, never patronizing Precious and never boring the reader. I loved every word."--Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, Arizona. An International Book of the Year for 1998.
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