"In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, gather to play mah jong, remember the past, and gossip into the night. United in unspeakable loss and new hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. . . . Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, memories that reveal these women's strength, worries, and determination, which their American-born daughters reject as irrelevant. The daughters, in turn, recall pivotal moments...

Esther Waters (1894) is a novel by George Moore. Considered his best novel, it was an immediate critical and commercial success, and has since been adapted several times for theater, film, and television. Like much of Moore's work, Esther Waters shows the influence of French naturalist writer Émile Zola, who sought to portray the influence of heredity and social environment on the lives of characters without shying away from poverty, sex, disease,...

"Learn about diversity in a gentle manner through the eyes of a second grader Lenny. Join him as he shadows his classmates for a special report on the Students of the Week. Through innocent, simple questions, Lenny discovers his new friends' families aren't all that different from his own."--Back cover.

Sadie works as a framer, building houses. She lost her own home in a recent divorce and now lives with her two daughters in a rented bungalow. When her landlady says she needs to move out, Sadie finds there's a housing crisis in her community. She can't find a place to live and is forced to move her family into a travel trailer at a local campsite. When her ex-husband finds out, he insists that the girls come live with him in another city. Desperate...

Can you stop a murder after it's already happened? Late October. After midnight. You're waiting up for your seventeen-year-old son. He's late. As you watch from the window, he emerges, and you realize he isn't alone: he's walking toward a man, and he's armed. You can't believe it when you see him do it: your funny, happy teenage son, he kills a stranger, right there on the street outside your house. You don't know who. You don't know why. You only...

A thirteen-year-old girl gains a much more sympathetic understanding of her relationship with her mother when she has to spend a day in her mother's body.

"Lady Anna" was written in 1871 and first published in 1874. It tells the story of Lady Lovel, whose ambitious marriage to the ill-reputed Earl Lovel left her with a child of questionable legitimacy. When her daughter, Lady Anna, is nearly twenty one, the Earl dies and his fortune is left to a distant nephew. Lady Anna must now decide to marry the young Frederick Lovel for money, or to disregard her mother's vicious meddling and marry her true love...

"For fans of A Man Called Ove, a luminous debut novel about a widow's unlikely friendship with a giant Pacific octopus reluctantly residing at the local aquarium-and the truths she finally uncovers about her son's disappearance 30 years ago"-- After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old...

If his mother has made other important mistakes, can Nick trust her word that there are no goblins and such lurking around in the night?

At the end of the twentieth century France found itself in the midst of another scandalous fin de siècle, awash with rumors and revelations of wrongdoing in high places. As the millennium expired, the Republic's servants, some sitting, others retired, received much condemnation, whether welcomed or resented. When taken together, surely les affaires now approximate in political significance (if not in noise or invective) those of the Dreyfus or Panama...