Pecola Breedlove, a young eleven-year-old black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in. Yet as her dreams grow more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity.--from...

Blinking Jack Stokes was a skinny tenant farmer, and Ruby Pitt Woodrow was "the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry ... They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life."--Pbk. cover.

Finally rolling into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores Price is determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up.

A boy sees a man commit a murder, then later that day the murderer calls on his mother with flowers. So begins the tense tale of a con man exploiting a love-starved woman, with an alcoholic husband and three children, and a boy who keeps a murder secret to avoid ruining his mother's happiness. The setting is a small town in Vermont, the time the 1960s.

At the age of fifteen, Michael Berg falls in love with a woman who disappears, and while observing a trial as a law student years later, he is shocked to discover the same woman as the defendant in a horrible crime.

At the age of ten, an Appalachian girl develops croaks, jerks and spasms, which leads to her explusion from school. After treatment--she has Tourette's syndrome--she learns to control herself, attends college and there is a happy ending. Rural Kentucky in the 1950s is not an easy place to grow up in, and it's especially hard for 10-year-old Icy Sparks, an orphan who lives with her grandparents. Life becomes even more difficult for Icy when the violent...

A Chilean woman searches for her lover in the goldfields of 1840s California. Arriving as a stowaway, Eliza finances her search with various jobs, including playing the piano in a brothel.

A woman who has everything going for her gives in to adultery. The heroine is Jo Becker of Massachusetts, a well-off veterinarian with grown children and a husband she loves. One day she meets a man from her past and it happens. The novel analyzes why.

Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and a young niece, Ruth. An Oprah Book Club selection and bestseller in hardcover, Drowning Ruth, now in paperback, is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart. Schwarz's first novel explores...

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides—the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage

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