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Recommendations based on Larry's Partyby Carol Shields
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by Carol Shields
A writer's life is upended when her daughter drops out of college and becomes a panhandler. A story of love, loss, and self-discovery.
Reta Winters, 44-year-old successful author of light summertime fiction, has always considered herself happy, even blessed. That is, until her oldest daughter Norah mysteriously drops out of college ... (Goodreads)
A Complicated Kindness
by Miriam Toews
A teenage girl navigates life in a strict Mennonite community while dealing with family dysfunction and questioning her faith.
The novel is set in a small religious Mennonite town called East Village, generally considered to be a fictionalized version of Toews' hometown of Steinbach , Manitoba . The narrator is Nomi Nickel, ... (Wikipedia)
Fugitive Pieces
by Anne Michaels
A poetic exploration of the trauma of displacement and the power of memory.
The novel is split into two sections: Book I and Book II. Jakob Beer is a 7-year-old child of a Jewish family living in Poland . His house is stormed by Nazis; he escapes the fate of his parents and ... (Wikipedia)
A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry
A gripping story of four unlikely lives intertwined in the tumult of India's caste system.
The book exposes the changes in Indian society from independence in 1947 to the Emergency called by Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi . Mistry was generally critical of Indira Gandhi in the book. ... (Wikipedia)
No Great Mischief
by Alistair MacLeod
A saga tracing a family's journey through generations of displacement and displacement.
Alistair MacLeod musters all of the skill and grace that have won him an international following to give us No Great Mischief , the story of a fiercely loyal family and the tradition that drives it. ... (Goodreads)
Three Day Road
by Joseph Boyden
Two Cree snipers fight in WWI, one returns home addicted to morphine, the other lost to the war.
It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, is ... (Goodreads)
The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
A woman's life story told through a series of vignettes, examining the joys and sorrows of life.
The book is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through ... (Wikipedia)
Barney's Version
by Mordecai Richler
A man's life story told with humour and heart, reflecting on his relationships, successes and regrets.
The story is written as if it is an autobiography by Barney Panofsky recounting his life in varying detail. Barney's version of events may be viewed as that of two unreliable narrators , in that his ... (Wikipedia)
A Patchwork Planet
by Anne Tyler
A young man's journey of self-discovery and finding his place in the world.
The novel is narrated by 30-year-old Barnaby, whose life has gone off the rails since he was caught robbing neighborhood homes as an adolescent. To the despair of his distant father, his social ... (Wikipedia)
Fall on Your Knees
by Ann-Marie MacDonald
A multi-generational saga of secrets, tragedy, and resilience in a family of sisters.
At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live. Working as a piano tuner, he meets and ... (Wikipedia)
Amy and Isabelle
by Elizabeth Strout
A mother-daughter relationship is tested when a scandal rocks their small New England town.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Strout’s bestselling and award winning debut, Amy and Isabelle—adapted for television by Oprah Winfrey— evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant ... (Goodreads)
All My Puny Sorrows
by Miriam Toews
A heart-wrenching story of two sisters as one battles depression and the other struggles to keep her alive.
The novel recounts the tumultuous relationship of the Von Riesen sisters, Elfrieda and Yolandi, the only children of an intellectual, free-spirited family from a conservative Mennonite community. ... (Wikipedia)
The Book of Negroes
by Lawrence Hill
A gripping tale of resilience and courage, tracing the life of a woman kidnapped in Africa and sold into slavery in North America.
The Book of Negroes (based on the novel Someone Knows My Name) will be BET's first miniseries. The star-studded production includes lead actress Aunjanue Ellis (Ray, The Help), Oscar winner Cuba ... (Goodreads)
We Are Water
by Wally Lamb
A family's struggle to reconcile their differences and make peace with their past.
In middle age, Annie Oh—wife, mother, and outsider artist—has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie has fallen in love with Viveca, the ... (Goodreads)
The Accidental Tourist
by Anne Tyler
A travel writer who hates traveling, Macon Leary, navigates life after his son's death and his wife's departure.
Set in Baltimore, Maryland , the plot revolves around Macon Leary, a writer of travel guides whose son has been killed in a shooting at a fast-food restaurant. He and his wife Sarah, separately lost ... (Wikipedia)
The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
A man's attempt to rebuild his life in a small Newfoundland town, discovering compassion and joy.
The story centers around Quoyle, a newspaper reporter from upstate New York , whose father had emigrated from Newfoundland . Shortly after his parents' joint suicide, Quoyle's unfaithful and abusive ... (Wikipedia)
Home
by Marilynne Robinson
A family's saga of tragedy and redemption, narrated in a lyrical and thought-provoking manner.
Home parallels the story told in Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. It is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and ... (Goodreads)
Rush Home Road
by Lori Lansens
A woman's journey through life, love, and loss as she takes in a young girl and confronts her own past.
Sharla Cody is only five, but has already lived a troubled life – only to find herself dumped on an elderly neighbor's doorstep when her mother takes off for the summer. Although Sharla is not the ... (Barnes & Noble)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
by Anne Tyler
A family grapple with their disappointments, as they come to terms with the past.
Pearl Tull is a rigid perfectionist. She has three children with her husband, traveling salesman Beck, who abandons the family. After Beck leaves, Pearl struggles to maintain a front as if nothing is ... (Wikipedia)
Crow Lake
by Mary Lawson
An exploration of family, loss, and identity, in a small farming community.
The death of their parents, when Kate is 7 years old, Bo a toddler, and her brothers in their late teens, threatens the family with dispersal and seems to spell the end of their parents' dream that ... (Wikipedia)
One True Thing
by Anna Quindlen
A woman learns about love and loss, grappling with the realities of life and death.
Ellen Gulden has a high-pressure job writing for, New York, magazine . Ellen is visiting her family home for her father's surprise birthday party. It becomes obvious that she deeply admires her ... (Wikipedia)
Every Last One
by Anna Quindlen
A family's search for resilience as they face tragedy and unexpected struggles.
The latest novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Anna Quindlen In this breathtaking and beautiful novel, the #1 New York Times" bestselling author Anna Quindlen creates an unforgettable portrait of a ... (Goodreads)
Moral Disorder and Other Stories
by Margaret Atwood
An exploration of the lives of characters in a small Canadian town, delving into their stories of joy, sorrow, and moral ambiguity.
Margaret Atwood is acknowledged as one of the foremost writers of our time. In Moral Disorder she has created a series of interconnected stories that trace the course of a life and also the lives ... (Goodreads)
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
by Katarina Bivald
A young woman's journey of self-discovery and finding her place in the world.
Once you let a book into your life, the most unexpected things can happen... Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. ... (Goodreads)
The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy
A moving story of two siblings growing up in India, exploring love, politics, and class.
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car ... (Goodreads)
When We Were Orphans
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A detective investigates the mysterious disappearance of his parents, uncovering secrets of his past.
The novel is about an Englishman named Christopher Banks. His early childhood was lived in the Shanghai International Settlement in China in the early 1900s, until his father, an opium businessman, ... (Wikipedia)
Gap Creek
by Robert Morgan
A rural family's struggles with poverty and hardships of life in the Appalachians.
Gap Creek's main character is a young girl, Julie, who does everything she possibly can to help her family and her new husband, Hank. Julie works hard to help her family when they need it, some even ... (Wikipedia)
Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
An exploration of the life of a small-town woman, revealing her struggles and emotional complexities.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition – its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. At times stern, at other times ... (Goodreads)
The Invention of Wings
by Sue Monk Kidd
A powerful story about a girl's journey to freedom, despite the limitations of slavery.
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world—and it is now ... (Goodreads)
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
An exploration of memory and its impact on the present, looking at the choices we make in life.
By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be ... (Goodreads)
