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2002–2003 Booklist

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
In a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, Jefferson, a young black man finds himself the unwitting party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed. Join us for Everybody Reads, Multnomah County Library's annual community-wide book discussion.
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
This National Book Award winner tells the story of John Grady Cole who, at 16, finds himself at the dying end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Young escape artist Joe Kavalier has just smuggled himself out of Hitler's Prague and is in New York City. His cousin Sammy Clay in Brooklyn is looking for a partner in creating heroes and art for comic books. Inspired by their own fantasies, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapist, the Monitor and other heroes as the golden age of comic books begins.
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery — personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.
Animal Dreams: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver
This suspenseful love story movingly explores life's largest commitments, blending flashbacks, dreams and Native American legends.
A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994 by Syvia Nasar
Sylvia Nasar recreates the life of a mathematical genius whose brilliant career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize.
Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min
Min has written a strikingly original, erotically charged portrayal of Madame Mao, one of the most vilified women of the 20th century.
Bee Season: A Novel by Myla Goldberg
When a previously indifferent 9-year-old student sweeps the local spelling bees, everyone sees her in a new light, one that changes the family dynamic.
Bel Canto: A Novel by Ann Patchett
A novel that is as lyrical and profound as it is unforgettable, Bel Canto engenders in the reader the very passion for art and the language of music that its characters discover.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney
Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of a hero's triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion.
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Ann Lamott
Anne Lamott shows you how to keep your eyes open and write about what you see. Then she shows you how to survive by turning to the art of life with bracingly honest humor.
Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found by Jennifer Lauck
Lauck's memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s, and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost.
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Containing a novel within a novel, The Blind Assassin is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. Told in a style that captures the colloquialisms of the 1930s and 1940s, it unfolds layer by layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist.
The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan
This is the story of LuLing Young, who searches for the name of her mother, the daughter of the famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain. The story conjures the pain of broken dreams, the power of myths, and the strength of love that enables us to recover in memory what we have lost in grief.
The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin
Walter Wangerin's allegorial fantasy concerns a time when the sun turned around the earth and animals could speak, when Chauntecleer the Rooster ruled over a more or less peaceful kingdom.
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town's less prosperous shopkeepers.
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Holden Caulfield, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.
Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam by Andrew X. Pham
Pham was born in Vietnam in 1967, moved with his family to California and now lives in Portland, Oregon. Here he chronicles his return to Vietnam, his travels on a rickety bicycle and his search for cultural identity.
Children of God: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell
The only member of the original mission to the planet Rakhat to return to Earth, Father Emilio Sandoz has barely begun to recover from his ordeal when the Society of Jesus calls upon him for help in preparing for another mission to Alpha Centauri. Despite his objections and fear, he cannot escape his past or the future.
Chocolat: A Novel by Joanne Harris
When Vianne Rocher and her daughter arrive in a small village and open a chocolate shop opposite the church during Lent, it's war between Vianne and the local priest.
Circles of Confusion by April Henry
Why did dear departed Aunt Cady have an exquisite old painting buried beneath World War II paraphernalia? And how can a painting so dramatically shift Claire's perspective on everything from her uninspired love life to her ho-hum job in the Oregon state custom license plate division?
Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx
These are stories of desperation, hard times and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes with the more benign values of the new West.
Close to Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence by Mike Capuzzo
Pulitzer Prize nominee Capuzzo recreates the summer of 1916, when a rogue great white shark attacked swimmers along the New Jersey shore, triggering mass hysteria and launching the most extensive shark hunt in history.
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz
This tour of the Old South explores why Americans are still engrossed with the Civil War and how it resonates today.
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
From the author of the acclaimed novel Wicked comes a fresh perspective on another timeless tale — Cinderella — sure to enchant readers young and old alike.
The Constant Gardener: A Novel by John Le Carre
A master at portraying the myriad deceits and betrayals within a misguided foreign office, Le Carre delves even deeper into the potential perils of unbridled capitalism.
Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
This sprawling novel follows the lives of the inhabitants of an idyllic Greek island from the peaceful days before World War II through the tumult of the war and into the present.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
Daughter of Fortune: A Novel by Isabel Allende
A Chilean immigrant disguises herself as a man and goes to the California Gold Rush fields to search for her lover.
Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
The wedding in question is that of Dabney Fairchilds, daughter of the most prominent plantation family in the region, and Troy Flavin, the family's overseer. How the family comes to terms with the social diminishment it must absorb by Dabney's willful choice is only one subject of Welty's subtle story.
Devil's Trumpet by Mary Freeman
Rachel O'Connor's landscaping client is found dead from an "accidental" fall. Suspects are easy to find, but digging out evidence isn't so easy. Before long, Rachel has to look out, before she encounters an "accident" of her own.
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
Set in post-apartheid Cape Town, Professor David Laurie attempts to relate to his daughter, Lucy, and to a society with new racial complexities. But that is disrupted by an afternoon of violence that changes him and his daughter in ways he could never have foreseen.
Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life by Alison Weir
A popular British historian focuses her professional biographical light on one of the most fascinating women in history.
Fall on Your Knees: A Novel by Ann-Marie MacDonald
This family saga takes us from haunted Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, through the battlefields of World War I, to the emerging jazz scene in New York City and into the lives of four unforgettable sisters.
Falling Leaves: The True Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah
Mah's story is a chronicle of nonstop emotional abuse from her wealthy father and his beautiful, cruel second wife.
The Family Orchard by Nomi Eve
This is a multigenerational novel spanning 200 years of an unforgettable family of immigrants in Jerusalem.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
A devastating expose of how the fast-food industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways.
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick
Gleick examines the phenomenon of "hurry sickness" that has taken hold of today's society through cell phones, computers, faxes and remote controls.
A Fine Balance: A Novel by Rohinton Mistry
A Fine Balance takes place in 1975, when the Indian government has just declared a State of Emergency. As a result, four strangers have been thrust together, forced to share a cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
The Five Thousand and One Nights by Penelope Lively
Booker Prize-winning author Lively brings us 14 stories, including an updated Scheherazade tale.
Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Bari Kolata
The 1918 influenza epidemic wiped out 40 million people in less than a year and afflicted more than one in four Americans.
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel
Drawing on the lifelong correspondence of Galileo with his daughter, Sobel has written a fascinating history of the Medici era in Italy.
Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland
This story of an "unknown" painting flows from its present owner back three centuries to its creation by the Dutch master Vermeer.
Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Chevalier transports readers to a bygone time and place in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings.
The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home by Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer takes readers on a tour of the transnational village our world has become. From Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels, to Atlanta's Olympic Village, which seems to interpret universalism in a corporate more than a truly human way, to Japan, where in the midst of alien surfaces his apartment building is called "The Memphis."
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a 14-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Armed with only with the invincible innocence of childhood, a brother and sister fashion a world for themselves in the shadow of their wreck of a family. A Booker Prize winner.
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
Pullman introduces readers to Lyra Belacqua, a half-wild, half-civilized girl whose carefree life among the scholars of Jordan College is about to be shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
This 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, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
In this classic story, Dickens shows the dangers of being driven by a desire for wealth and social status, as his infamous character Pip grows up in London society.
The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw
Brokaw pays homage to the folks who fought World War II and then built America.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage by Alice Munro
This is the tenth collection of stories from Canada's chronicler of women's external fates, inner lives and painful journeys toward and away from self-understanding.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Egger
This moving memoir is the story of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his 8-year-old brother.
Holes by Louis Sachar
As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure and a new sense of himself.
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
A man without a single asset enters a life devoid of opportunity and his tumble down house becomes a potent symbol of the search for identity in a postcolonial world.
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus
On a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah yearns to restore his family's dignity. When an attractive bungalow comes available on county auction for a fraction of its value, he sees a great opportunity for himself, his wife, and his children. But the house's former owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, doesn't see it that way, nor does her lover, a married cop driven to extremes to win her love and get her house back.
In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer by Irene Gut Opdyke
Just a girl of 17 when the Germans and Russians divided and devoured her native Poland, Irene Gut Opdyke put her own life in danger to save Jews.
Invisible Manby Ralph Ellison
In this classic by Ellison, an African American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins
Lance Armstrong tells his inspiring story, from the dark night of advanced testicular cancer through his dramatic victory in the 1999 Tour de France.
Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
Carey fashions an utterly captivating mystery with the story of thief Jack Maggs — a recent escapee from the prison island of Australia — who risks his life seeking vengeance and reconciliation.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Experience the classic romance between an orphaned governess and her employer, the brooding Edwin Rochester.
John Adams by David McCullough
Deftly and with a brilliant eye for detail, McCullough describes the childhood, youth and coming of age of Adams, the fiercely driven Massachusetts farmer-lawyer whose marriage to Abigail is one of the great real-life love stories.
The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of From Beirut to Jerusalem presents an investigation of globalization, the most significant socioeconomic trend in the world today.
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life for Elena's daughter, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
Indian author Sherman Alexie presents a highly acclaimed collection of 22 interlinked short stories.
Losing Nelson: A Novel by Barry Unsworth
This is a novel of obsession, the story of Charles Cleasby, a man unable to see himself separately from the hero, Lord Horatio Nelson, he mistakenly idolizes.
Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones
For Alice Mannegan, an American living in Beijing, adventure begins with a phone call from an American archaeologist seeking a translator, and ends in an intoxicating journey of the heart.
Love On Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White by Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone
In the 1920s, America became fascinated by an unusual love story. Leonard Rhinelander, a high society man, married Alice Jones. But did he know that Alice was black? A court would later decide whether Alice Jones fooled Leonard Rhinelander.
The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett
After the magician Parsifal's death, Sabine, his assistant for 20 years and wife of a few months, discovers that the family he said was dead is very much alive.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
Sacks recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders.
The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester
William Smith developed the first true geographical map following fossils and rock patterns, earning him a place in history as the father of modern geology.
Metal Cowboy: Tales From the Road Less Pedaled by Joe Kurmaskie
A cyclist shares his view of American small towns, peculiar moments and unforgettable people.
The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
When Tilo, disguised in the gnarled body of an old woman, travels to present-day Oakland, California, an unexpected romance with a handsome stranger forces her to choose between the supernatural life of an immortal and the vicissitudes of modern life.
Mother of Pearl by Melinda Haynes
This debut novel weaves the story of the friendship between a black man and a white teenage girl, each surrounded by a myriad of other characters, and how their friendship reaches across racial barriers and encompasses their entire community.
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
This is the gritty and uproarious tale of a Brooklyn P.I. with problems: a dead boss, women trouble, and an uncontrollable case of Tourette's syndrome. Winner of the National Book Critic's Award
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
In a vibrant study of Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway records his own five years in the French city, describing his creative struggles and sharing portraits of such fellow expatriates as Fitzgerald, Pound and Stein.
My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain
When a travel writer realizes the painful cost of her refugee existence, she returns to Ireland to investigate the true story of a scandalous affair between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant during the latter years of the famine.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them.
Night by Elie Wiesel
Powerful and moving, this is Elie Wiesel's true story of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War Two.
Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks
Award-winning journalist Geraldine Brooks offers an intimate, often shocking portrait of the lives of modern Muslim women, and shows how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once-liberating faith.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Novel by George Orwell
A terrifying vision of a totalitarian future.
On the Rez by Ian Frazier
This astute, personal and disarmingly frank book assesses life and conflict among the Oglala Sioux on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
This fictional history follows several generations and the passions, thoughts and myths of a labyrinth of people. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.
Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings by Jonathan Raban
Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau, transversing a gulf of centuries and cultures, and offering captivating discourses on art, philosophy and navigation with an unsparing narrative of personal loss.
Personal History by Katharine Graham
Katharine Graham's memoir traces her life, starting with her childhood in a world of high privilege among the New York and Washington aristocracy, through her difficult marriage to Phil Graham, to becoming owner of the Washington Post, which she built into one of the nation's most respected news organizations.
Poker Nation: A High-Stakes, Low-Life Adventure into the Heart of a Gambling Country by Andy Bell
Andy Bellin takes readers on a fun and mesmerizing journey into the obsessive world of professional poker, where "the only thing stranger than a poker player is the guy sitting next to him."
Pope Joan: A Novel by Donna Cross
There are few historical heroines as fascinating and controversial as Pope Joan, a woman whose hunger for knowledge and independent nature led her to pass as a man and ultimately to attain the high seat in Rome.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
This comedy of manners features splendidly civilized sparring between Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet, as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of 18th century drawing-room intrigues.
Primitive People by Francine Prose
After fleeing the chaos and violence of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a young woman takes a position in a home in the Hudson Valley, where she observes the barbaric rituals that pass for social and family life.
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less by Ryan Terry
A bestselling memoir starring a Midwestern wife and mother whose prize-winning poetry and prose kept her family afloat through the most difficult of times.
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate takes over the countryside, the novel's characters find their connections to one another in the forested mountains of southern Appalachia.
Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey by Jane Goodall
Goodall's spiritual autobiography explores her deepest beliefs about spirituality and moral evolution.
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
Her name is Dinah. In the Bible, her life is only hinted at within the more familiar chapters of the Book of Genesis that are about her father, Jacob, and his dozen sons. Told in Dinah's voice, this novel reveals the traditions and turmoils of ancient womanhood — the world of the red tent.
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams
Utah-born naturalist Terry Tempest Williams records the simultaneous tragedies of her mother's death of cancer and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Sanctuary.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler
A young American teacher in the Peace Corps lives in the small Chinese city of Fuling as it navigates increasing waves of cultural and social upheaval.

The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama
A Chinese man recuperates from tuberculosis on the eve of WWII in his family's summer home in Japan, where he meets four of the local residents.
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying attractions in sports history. Three men changed Seabiscuit's fortunes. Over four years, the unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic also-ran into an American sports icon.
A Separate Peace; A Novel by John Knowles
Set at an elite boarding school for boys during World War II, A Separate Peace is the story of friendship and treachery, and how a tragic accident involving two young men forever tarnishes their innocence.
Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore
The brother of Gary Gilmore, the murderer immortalized in Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, tells the story of their wildly dysfunctional family, a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder.
The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga
The Italians call them "Mud Angels," the young foreigners who come to Florence in 1966 to save the city's treasured art from the Arno's flooded banks. American volunteer Margot Harrington is one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library of a Carmelite convent where she discovers a sensuous volume of sixteen erotic poems and drawings.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
When Matthiessen went to Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and, possibly, to glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard, he undertook his five-week trek as winter snows were sweeping into the high passes.
So Big: A Novel by Edna Ferber
A rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life, this novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges.
Sometimes a Great Notion: A Novel by Ken Kesey
This is the powerful tale of an Oregon logging clan.
Songs in Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris
Marie Fermoyle is a strong but vulnerable divorced woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for dangerous con man Omar Duvall.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
A charismatic Jesuit priest leads a 21st-century scientific mission to a newly discovered extraterrestrial culture.
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir
The adopted daughter of the king of Morocco, whose father was arrested and executed for a 1972 attempt to assassinate the king, tells the story of how she, her mother, and her five siblings endured years of imprisonment in a desert penal colony.
The Tale of Murasaki: A Novel by Liza Crihfield Dalby
In a beautiful work of literary archaeology, Dalby subtly reconstructs the sensibilities, manners, fashions, and preoccupations of 11th-century Japan. The result is a vivid portrait of a woman and her times, which were among the most splendid in Japanese history.
Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at Table by Ruth Reichl
The candid and comical memoir by the renowned New York Times restaurant critic whose high-spirited life has always been defined and enriched by food.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The most widely read work of African fiction, about the missionary experience from an African point of view.
Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports From My Life With Autism by Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin, a gifted animal scientist who is also autistic, delivers a report on autism, written from her unique perspective. What emerges is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who bridged the gulf between her condition and our own, shedding light on the riddle of our common identity.
Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama by David Mamet
David Mamet believes that the tendency to dramatize is essential to human nature and that we create drama out of everything from today's weather to next year's elections. But the highest expression of this drive remains the theater.
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief (who was also her lover), Ned sees his first prison cell at 15 and by the age of 26 has become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over whole towns and defying the law until he is finally captured and hanged.
The Voyage of the Narwhal: A Novel by Andrea Barrett
Part adventure, part love story, this novel captures a crucial moment in the history of exploration. Combining fact and fiction, the story focuses on Erasmus Darwin Wells, a 19th-century scholar/naturalist and his expedition to search for an open polar sea. Winner of the National Book Award.
Waiting by Ha Jin
A doctor in Communist China must wait 18 years before he can divorce his wife in order to marry the nurse he loves.
The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart by Alice Walker
A collection of fictional stories based on Walker's life.
When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein
Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein crafts a story that reads like a first-rate thriller from beginning to end.
White Teeth: A Novel by Zadie Smith
At the center of this novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, hapless veterans of World War II. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn't quite match her name. The histories of the two London families are intertwined to present an empire's worth identity, history and hope.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jane Rhys
This story of the first Mrs. Rochester will turn your sympathies and understanding of Jane Eyre upside down.

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