Heart in the Right Place by Carolyn Jourdan

Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Carolyn offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community—and what it means to change the world face-to-face.



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Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber

Lena is a fingerprint expert at a crime lab in the small city of Syracuse, New York. A series of crib deaths—indistinguishable from SIDS except for the fevered testimony of one distraught mother with connections in high places—draws the attention of the police and the national media and raises the possibility of the inconceivable: could there be a serial infant murderer on the loose? Gifted with significant powers of intuition, Lena finds herself playing a critical role in the case. But then there is the mystery of her own childhood to solve. Could the improbable deaths of a half-dozen babies be somehow connected to her own improbable survival?



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The Rest of Her Life by Laura Moriarty

Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy -- the effects of which not only divide Leigh’s family, but polarize the entire community. Leigh grapples with the hard reality of what her daughter has done and the devastating consequences her actions have on the family of another teenage girl in town, all while struggling to protect Kara in the face of rising public outcry.



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Run by Ann Patchett

Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard cares about is his ability to keep his children—all his children—safe.


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The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

When her yapping corgis lead her to a mobile library, Her Majesty develops a new obsession with reading. She finds herself devouring works by a tantalizing range of authors, from the Brontë sisters to Jean Genet. With a young member of the palace kitchen staff guiding her choices, it’s not long before the Queen begins to develop a new perspective on the world - one that alarms her closest advisers and tempts her to make bold new decisions.


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The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber

Jake Mishkin’s seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer—or killers—unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years.



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For One More Day by Mitch Albom

Charley is a broken man. His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret. He loses his job. He leaves his family. He hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding. And he decides to take his own life. On a desperate midnight ride to his former home he makes an astonishing discovery. His mother - who died eight years earlier - is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing ever happened. What follows is the one 'ordinary' day so many of us yearn for, a chance to make good with a lost parent, to explain the family secrets, and to seek forgiveness.



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Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation by Cokie Roberts

Personal correspondence, private journals, and even favored recipes bring to life the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed, and Martha Washington -- proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might never have survived.

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The Island by Victoria Hislop

Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother's past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London. When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia gives her daughter a letter to take to an old friend. When she arrives in her mother’s home town of Plaka, Alexis is astonished at its proximity to the deserted island of Spinalonga — Greece's former leper colony. Finding her mother’s friend she hears the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and discovers how intimately she is connected with the island and its leper colony.


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Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm during the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish

Mildred Kalish’s memoir of her childhood on a farm in Iowa during the depths of the Great Depression shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a romp.” Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards in the midst of a family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures.



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Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland

Instantly recognizable, Auguste Renoir’s masterpiece depicts a gathering of his real friends enjoying a summer Sunday on a café terrace along the Seine near Paris. A wealthy painter, an art collector, an Italian journalist, a war hero, a celebrated actress, and Renoir’s future wife, among others, share this moment of la vie moderne. Narrated by Renoir and seven of the models and using settings in Paris and on the Seine, Vreeland illuminates the gusto and art of the era.



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Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog by John Grogan

John and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they bought home Marley, a wiggly yellow fur ball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.



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One Thousand White Women:The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus

May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial "Brides for Indians" program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man's world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime.



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Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet by Xinran

In 1958, notified that her husband, a doctor in the Chinese army, was killed in action in Tibet, Shu Wen joined a militia unit going to the Tibetan north, where she was soon separated from the regiment. Without supplies or knowledge of the language, Shu Wen wandered until she was rescued by a family of nomads who helped her to discover the details of her husband’s death. A haunting portrait of a great love and a mysterious land based on a true story.


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Escape by Carolyn Jessop

Carolyn Jessop was born and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS). As a teenager she was forced into plural marriage with a man thirty-two years her senior. After fifteen years of coping with her husband’s psychological abuse and competition with his other wives, Carolyn wanted out. But no woman had ever escaped from the FLDS and kept her children. In 2003 she chose freedom over fear and fled with her eight children—and kept them.



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