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This enchanting novel tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her unusual family who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Cassandras eccentric father is a writer whose first book took the literary world by storm but he has since failed to write a single word and now spends his time reading detective fiction. Cassandras sister, Rose, despairs of her familys circumstances and determines to marry their affluent...
3) Sula
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Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in...
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First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into haves and have nots evolves a drama that is intensely human...
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#ReadInColor: Black Main Characters
10 to Try - The Book Was Better
African American Authors
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10 to Try - The Book Was Better
African American Authors
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"The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning nearly thirty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug...
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Everyman's library volume 216
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English
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Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers...
7) The namesake
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English
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Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world -- conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. The Namesake brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations....
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When Sir Thomas Bertram decides to bring up his poor niece Fanny with his own children, he introduces into Mansfield Park a strong character of good sense. Fanny is acutely aware of her inferior status, yet she dares to love Edmund Bertram from afar. But with five marriageable young people on the premises, the peace at Mansfield cannot last. Courtships, parties, and intrigues throw the place into turmoil, and Fanny finds herself unwillingly competing...
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This is the tale of family, memory, love, and living told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. Through the voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief a hopeful and joyful story.
10) Ulysses
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James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery.
Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly allusive novel, revolutionary in its modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway.
Scandalously frank, wittily erudite,...
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On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister, Cecilia, strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined...
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"Cecilia Ross is looking for a change. She has decided to take time off from her job as a successful motivational speaker and sell her home. She moves in to a beautiful old house in St. Paul, Minnesota, complete with a big front porch, a wild garden, a chef's kitchen--and three roommates. The four women are different ages, but all are feeling restless, and want to take a roadtrip to find again the people and things they miss. One woman wants to connect...
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Hollis Shaw's life seems picture-perfect. She's the star of the popular food blog "Hungry with Hollis," and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, Matthew leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. The cracks in Hollis's perfect life--her strained marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter Caroline--grow deeper. When Hollis hears about something...
14) Beloved: a novel
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Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose...
15) Ethan Frome
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English
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Ethan works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence.
16) Dubliners
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Everyman's library volume 49
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English
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Dubliners is both a vivid and unflinching portrait of "dear, dirty Dublin" at the turn of the century, and a moral history of a nation and a people.
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The drama of a U.S. missionary family in Africa during a war of decolonization. At its center is Nathan Price, a self-righteous Baptist minister who establishes a mission in a village in 1959 Belgian Congo. The resulting clash of cultures is seen through the eyes of his wife and his four daughters. By the author of Pigs in Heaven.
18) Mrs. Dalloway
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English
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Mrs. Dalloway is the portrait of a single day in a woman's life. Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation--fresh flower shopping, new dress buying, and festive room decorating. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, memories flood her mind, and she is awash in the sensations of faraway times. Clarissa blissfully relives her carefree youth and early loves, stoically witnesses the approach...
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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. As I Lay Dying is the harrowing, darkly comic tale of the Bundren family's trek across Mississippi to bury Addie, their wife and mother, as told by each of the family members--including Addie herself.
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BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An affluent Indian family is forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
“[The God of Small Things] offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It’s that haunting.”—USA Today
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“[The God of Small Things] offers such magic, mystery, and sadness that, literally, this reader turned the last page and decided to reread it. Immediately. It’s that haunting.”—USA Today
Compared...
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