Stolen Lives

By Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi

At the age of 5, Malika Oufkir, eldest daughter of General Oufkir, was adopted by King Muhammad V of Morocco and sent to live in the palace as part of the royal court. There she led a life of unimaginable privilege and luxury alongside the king's own daughter. King Hassan II ascended the throne following Muhammad V's death, and in 1972 General Oufkir was found guilty of treason after staging a coup against the new regime, and was summarily executed. Immediately afterward, Malika, her mother, and her five siblings were arrested and imprisoned, despite having no prior knowledge of the coup attempt.

They were first held in an abandoned fort, where they ate moderately well and were allowed to keep some of their fine clothing and books. Conditions steadily deteriorated, and the family was eventually transferred to a remote desert prison, where they suffered a decade of solitary confinement, torture, starvation, and the complete absence of sunlight. Oufkir's horrifying descriptions of the conditions are mesmerizing, particularly when contrasted with her earlier life in the royal court, and many graphic images will long haunt readers. Finally, teetering on the edge of madness and aware that they had been left to die, Oufkir and her siblings managed to tunnel out using their bare hands and teaspoons, only to be caught days later. Her account of their final flight to freedom makes for breathtaking reading.

The Quiet Game

By Greg Iles

Trying to cope with the recent death of his wife, Cage takes his 5-year-old daughter to Florida's Disney World, where the child sadly sees visions of her mother everywhere in the fantasy-filled environment. Wouldn't a trip to his parents' stately home in Natchez be more soothing for all concerned? Wrong, as it turns out--and before Cage can catch his breath, he's deeply involved in several dangerous matters. His father, a dedicated doctor, is being blackmailed for a past mistake in judgment, and a powerful judge (who just happens to be the father of Penn's high school sweetheart) has a nasty personal agenda of his own. Then there's the unsolved 1968 murder case of a black man, which Cage insists on reopening with the help of an attractive, ambitious newspaper publisher.

Is there space in the overcrowded courtroom for one more writer of sharp, very suspenseful legal thrillers? Yes--if that writer is Greg Iles, who has proven in such varied efforts as Black Cross, Mortal Fear, and Spandau Phoenix that he knows how to squeeze the last drop of suspense out of all sorts of situations.

Iles immediately makes us feel both sympathy and empathy for his glossy hero, Penn Cage--a former ace Texas prosecutor turned suspense novelist whose sales are up there in the John Grisham Himalayan range. ~~ Amazon

Mockingjay

By Suzanne Collins

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she’s made it out of the bloody arena alive, she’s still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what’s worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss' family, not her friends, not the people of District 12. Powerful and haunting, this thrilling final installment of Suzanne Collins' groundbreaking Hunger Games trilogy promises to be one of the most talked about books of the year.

Gracelings

By Kristin Cashore

Katsa has been able to kill a man with her bare hands since she was eight—she’s a Graceling, one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill. As niece of the king, she should be able to live a life of privilege, but Graced as she is with killing, she is forced to work as the king’s thug. When she first meets Prince Po, Graced with combat skills, Katsa has no hint of how her life is about to change: She never expects to become Po’s friend. She never expects to learn a new truth about her own Grace—or about a terrible secret that lies hidden far away . . . A secret that could destroy all seven kingdoms with words alone.

With elegant, evocative prose and a cast of unforgettable characters, debut author Kristin Cashore creates a mesmerizing world, a death-defying adventure, and a heart-racing romance that will consume you, hold you captive, and leave you wanting more. ~~ back cover

East of Eden

By John Steinbeck


Published in 1952, it is a symbolic recreation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel woven into a history of California's Salinas Valley. With East of Eden Steinbeck hoped to reclaim his standing as a major novelist, but his broad depictions of good and evil come at the expense of subtlety in characterization and plot and it was not a critical success.

Spanning the period between the American Civil War and the end of World War I, the novel highlights the conflicts of two generations of brothers; the first being the kind, gentle Adam Trask and his wild brother Charles. The second generation of brothers vie for their father's approval. In bitterness Caleb reveals the truth about their mother to Aron, who then joins the army and is killed in France.

Outlander

By Diana Gabaldon

The year is 1945. Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon -- when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach -- an "outlander" -- in a Scotland torn by war and raiding Highland clans in the year of our Lord . . . 1743.

Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire is catapulted into intrigues and dangers that may threaten her life . . . and shatter her heart. For here she meets James Frazer, a gallant young Scots warrior, and becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire . . . and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives. ~~ back cover

Gabaldon is another great storyteller snatching us into her page turner novel of history, love, and adventure. She paints her characters so well they become very real. You know their thoughts, feelings, and motives. You feel their pain and joy. Claire is strong, educated, and feisty. Jamie epitomizes the mythical man -- a fierce protector, strong, confident, witty, warm, capable of expressing himself emotionally, with a flair for intimacy :)

Claire questions the morality of loving two very different men separated by centuries and whether she should use her education and knowledge of history to save people she has come to love. What impact would her choices make on the present and the future? Her own life? We know what Doc of Back to the Future says in Part I "Must not do anything to upset the space time continuum" and then in Part III he resigned with, "I figured, what the hell."

Note: This does contain sexual content.

Angry Housewives Eating Bon bons

By Lorna Landvik

Five friends live through three decades of marriages, child raising, neighborhood parties, bad husbands and good brownies-and Landvik (Patty Jane's House of Curl) doesn't miss a single cliche as she chronicles their lives in this pleasant but wholly familiar novel of female bonding. When Faith Owens's husband is transferred from Texas to the "stupid godforsaken frozen tundra" of Freesia Court, Minn., in 1968, her life looks like it's going to be one dull, snowy slog-until the power goes out one evening and a group of what appear to be madwomen start a snowball fight in her backyard.

These dervishes turn out to be her neighbors: antiwar activist Slip; sexpot Audrey; painfully shy Merit; and widow Kari. They become fast friends and decide to escape their humdrum routine by starting the Freesia Court Book Club, later given the eponymous name by one of their disgruntled husbands.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

By Khaled Hosseini

It's difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. Hosseini's compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national tragedy to a tale of two women that is weighted equally with despair and grave hope.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is an in-depth exploration of Afghan society in the three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban cruelty. Hosseini impels us to empathize with and admire those most victimized by Afghan history and culture—women. Mariam, a 15-year-old bastard whose mother commits suicide, is married off to 40-year-old Rasheed, who abuses her brutally, especially after she has several miscarriages. At 60, Rasheed takes in 14-year-old Laila, whose parents were blown up by stray bombs. He soon turns violent with her. Although Laila is united with her childhood beloved, the potential return of the Taliban always shadows their happiness.

~~ Amazon

The Help

By Kathryn Stockett

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken. Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women—mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends—view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.

John Adams

By David McCullough

Left to his own devices, John Adams might have lived out his days as a Massachusetts country lawyer, devoted to his family and friends. As it was, events swiftly overtook him, and Adams--who, David McCullough writes, was "not a man of the world" and not fond of politics--came to greatness as the second president of the United States, and one of the most distinguished of a generation of revolutionary leaders. He found reason to dislike sectarian wrangling even more in the aftermath of war, when Federalist and anti-Federalist factions vied bitterly for power, introducing scandal into an administration beset by other difficulties--including pirates on the high seas, conflict with France and England, and all the public controversy attendant in building a nation.

Overshadowed by the lustrous presidents Washington and Jefferson, who bracketed his tenure in office, Adams emerges from McCullough's brilliant biography as a truly heroic figure--not only for his significant role in the American Revolution but also for maintaining his personal integrity in its strife-filled aftermath. McCullough spends much of his narrative examining the troubled friendship between Adams and Jefferson, who had in common a love for books and ideas but differed on almost every other imaginable point. Reading his pages, it is easy to imagine the two as alter egos. (Strangely, both died on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.) But McCullough also considers Adams in his own light, and the portrait that emerges is altogether fascinating. ~~ Amazon

Friday Night Knitting Club

By Kate Jacobs

Georgia Walker's entire life is wrapped up in running her knitting store, Walker and Daughter, and caring for her 12-year-old daughter, Dakota. With the help of Anita, a lively widow in her seventies, Georgia starts the Friday Night Knitting Club, which draws loyal customers and a few oddballs.

Darwin Chiu, a feminist grad student, believes knitting is downright old-fashioned, but she's drawn to the club as her young marriage threatens to unravel. Lucie, 42, a television producer, is about to become a mother for the first time--without a man in her life. Brash book editor KC finds her career has stalled unexpectedly, while brilliant Peri works at Walker and Daughter by day and designs handbags at night.

Georgia gets her own taste of upheaval when Dakota's father reappears, hoping for a second chance. The yarn picks up steam as it draws to a conclusion, and an unexpected tragedy makes it impossible to put down. ~~ Amazon

Because I Said So

By Dawn Meehan

One of the most popular mommy-bloggers thanks to a humorous eBay listing about her child's baseball which was circulated rapidly until she became a household name, Dawn Meehan offers readers a hilarious journey along with her six kids on madcap adventures, underscoring the notion that a sense of humor is an essential parenting skill.

Because I Said So affirms that parents are not alone in the daily chaos, struggles and joys of child-rearing. With a huge dose of laugh-out-loud, real-life examples, Dawn shares hard-won wisdom gleaned from life with six children.

With refreshing honesty, she examines episodes from her everyday life and spins them in a humorous light, offering reassurance and guidance to overworked, overstressed parents. Her stories communicate that it's okay for kids to be kids. ~~ Amazon

The Glass Castle

By Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father.

To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar).

Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover. ~~ Amazon

Jeannette Walls -- Video Clip

A Grief Observed

By C. S. Lewis

C.S. Lewis joined the human race when his wife, Joy Gresham, died of cancer. Lewis, the Oxford don whose Christian apologetics make it seem like he's got an answer for everything, experienced crushing doubt for the first time after his wife's tragic death. A Grief Observed contains his epigrammatic reflections on that period: "Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high," Lewis writes. "Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."

This is the book that inspired the film Shadowlands, but it is more wrenching, more revelatory, and more real than the movie. It is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings. -- Michael Joseph Gross

The Five Love Languages

How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate

By Gary Chapman

He sends you flowers when what you really want is time to talk. She gives you a hug when what you really need is a home-cooked meal. The problem isn't your love -- it's your love language! In this international bestseller, Dr. Gary Chapman reveals how different people express love in five different ways:

Quality Time . . . Words of Affirmation . . . Gifts . . .
Acts of Service . . . Physical Touch

What speaks volumes to you may be meaningless to your spouse. But, here, at last is the key to understanding each other's unique needs. Apply the right principles, learn the right language, and soon you'll know the profound satisfaction and joy of being able to express your love -- and feeling truly loved in return.

Escape

By Carolyn Jessop

Seventeen years after being forced into a polygamous marriage, Jessop escaped from the cultlike Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints with her eight children. She recounts the horrid events that led her to break free from the oppressive world she knew and how she has managed to survive since escaping, despite threats and legal battles with her husband and the Church. Though sometimes her retelling overflows with colorful foreshadowing and commentary on how exceptional she is, the everyday details she reveals about this polygamous society are devastating and tragic.

The Innkeeper's Wife

By Lynda M. Wilson

I’m the innkeeper’s wife. My name is Hannah. Come with me. My husband says you can stay the night in our stable. It is a little way from the inn, but I think you will be all right there. Joseph looked at Mary and waited. “Yes, Joseph. We can’t stay here.” Suddenly her face tightened and she reached for Joseph’s hand. She put her head down and all she said was “Oh!” That was all I needed. I saw instantly that her husband, though he would have defended her at that moment with his very life, could not help her. His wife was in labor.

This original and stirring fictional account of the Christmas story introduces readers to Hannah, the innkeeper’s wife. The author takes a deeper look at what could have been as she allows us to view the Nativity through the eyes of the supposed midwife to Mary. Readers travel back with Hannah to the day when Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem and forward to the miraculous account of when shepherds came and witnessed of angels. ~~ Amazon

These is my Words

By Nancy E. Turner

The classic adventure of one courageous woman's life and struggles in the Arizona Territories in the late nineteenth century . . . Winner of the Arizona Author Award and Finalist of the Willa Cather Literary Award.

"Jack and Sarah are as delicious a couple as Rhett and Scarlett. The three-hankie ending to their long love affair will definitely make you give a damn." ~~ USA Today

"Clear, at times lyrical prose . . . providing vivid, colorful characters and historically accurate backdrop." ~~ Washington Post

A moving, exciting, and heartfelt American saga inspired by the author's own family memoirs, these words belong to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon -- from child to determined young adult to loving mother -- she shares the turbulent events, both joyous and tragic, that molded her, and recalls the enduring love with cavalry officer Captain Jack Elliot that gave her strength and purpose. ~~ back cover

Sarah, who longingly wants to be more beautiful, refined, and religious like her sister-in-law, just possesses too much grit and spitfire and can out shoot any man. Qualities needed and well used in surviving the rugged frontier. Indian raids are a constant fear and threat.

One serendipitous event of traveling on the wagon trek was the acquisition of a large stash of books which set Sarah on the path of learnin'. Secondly, was the watchful care of Captain Elliot -- a man so fierce one minute and so gentle the next. Sarah couldn't decide if was a scoundrel or gentleman.

Check out Nancy Turner's website to see the other two books in this saga.

The Undomestic Goddess

By Sopia Kinsella

Samantha Sweeting, the 29-year-old heroine of Kinsella's latest confection (after Shopaholic Sister), is on the verge of partnership at the prestigious London law firm Carter Spink—the Holy Grail of her entire workaholic life. But when she finds she has made a terrible, costly mistake just before the partnership decision, she's terrified of being fired. In a fog, she stumbles out of the building and onto the nearest train, which drops her in the countryside, where she wanders to a stately home. The nouveau riche lady of the house mistakes her for the new housekeeper—and Samantha is too astonished to correct her.

Numb and unable to face returning to London, Samantha tries to master the finer points of laundry, cooking and cleaning. She discovers that the slow life, her pompous but good-hearted employers and the attentions of the handsome gardener, Nathaniel, suit her just fine. But her past is hard to escape, and when she discovers a terrible secret about her firm—and when the media learns that the former legal star is scrubbing toilets for a living—her life becomes more complicated than ever. ~~ Amazon

Breaking Dawn

By Stephenie Meyer

"When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options."

To be irrevocably in love with a vampire is both fantasy and nightmare woven into a dangerously heightened reality for Bella Swan. Pulled in one direction by her intense passion for Edward Cullen, and in another by her profound connection to werewolf Jacob Black, she has endured a tumultuous year of temptation, loss, and strife to reach the ultimate turning point. Her imminent choice to either join the dark but seductive world of immortals or pursue a fully human life has become the thread from which the fate of two tribes hangs.

Now that Bella has made her decision, a startling chain of unprecendented events is about to unfold. ~~ front book flap

One Tattered Angel

By Blaine M. Yorgason

"Blaine, I think this little girl is our baby."

Little did Kathy Yorgason realize what those words would come to mean.

Charity Afton Yorgason was born with a brain. She had a brain stem which operated her autonomic nervous system and allowed her lungs and heart to work. But, her foster parents were told, she would use any of her senses. never experience joy or love, never feel pain or any other physical sensation. And she would most likely die before she was two years old. Blaine and Kathy's response was simple, "If she needs a home, we'll be happy to give it to her."

So Charity was adopted by the Yorgason family and the miracles began . . .