Oprah's book club | Oak Park Public Library

1) Behold the dreamers: a novel

Author

Mbue, Imbolo

Volume

2017 selection

Earliest Publication Date

2016

Description

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When Jende Jonga journeys to New York City from Cameroon in 2004 on a visitors' visa in hopes of obtaining a green card, he's sure his life will only improve. After saving up enough money to bring over Jende's wife, Neni, and six-year-old son, the family moves into an apartment in Harlem. Then Jende hits the jackpot in 2007 when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a wealthy Lehman Brothers executive. But working for the Edwardses isn't...

2) The water dancer: a novel

Author

Coates, Ta-Nehisi

Volume

2019

Earliest Publication Date

2019

Description

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"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...

3) Demon Copperhead

Author

Kingsolver, Barbara

Volume

2022

Earliest Publication Date

2022

Description

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Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing...

4) Let us descend: a novel

Author

Ward, Jesmyn

Volume

2023

Earliest Publication Date

2023

Description

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"Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long...

5) A lesson before dying

Author

Gaines, Ernest J., 1933-2019

Earliest Publication Date

1993

Description

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From the author of, A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man returns to 1940s Cajun, he visits and forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. Best Books for Young Teen Readers. In the 1940s in rural Louisiana,...

6) A map of the world

Author

Hamilton, Jane, 1957 July 13-

Earliest Publication Date

1994

Description

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of the widely acclaimed The Book of Ruth comes a harrowing, heartbreaking drama about a rural American family and a disastrous event that forever changes their lives.
"It takes a writer of rare power and discipline to carry off an achievement like A Map of the World. Hamilton proves here that she is one of the best." —Newsweek

The Goodwins, Howard, Alice, and their...

7) A million little pieces

Author

Frey, James, 1969-

Earliest Publication Date

2003

Description

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping memoir about the nature of addiction and the meaning of recovery from a bold and talented literary voice. “Anyone who has ever felt broken and wished for a better life will find inspiration in Frey’s story.” —People
“A great story.... You can't help but cheer his victory.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
By the time he entered a drug and

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8) A tale of two cities, and, Great expectations

Author

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870

Earliest Publication Date

2010

Description

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Two of Dicken's novels are republished. The first follows a group from the tranquil roads of London to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror. The second follows the life of the orphaned Pip from the wild Kent marshes through a series of events as he abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman.

9) A virtuous woman

Author

Gibbons, Kaye, 1960-

Earliest Publication Date

1989

Description

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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.

10) Back roads

Author

O'Dell, Tawni

Earliest Publication Date

2000

Description

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Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his closed-minded, stricken coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's constantly reminded of just how messed up his life is.With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, Harley is an orphan with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager. Just nineteen years old, he's marooned...

11) BLACK AND BLUE

Author

Quindlen, Anna

Earliest Publication Date

1998

Description

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A nurse escapes her abusive husband, a New York policeman, taking their son with her to Florida. She assumes a new identity and even finds romance, but there is a price, the 10-year-old boy misses his father and she lives in constant fear the father will find them, which he does. The novel analyzes why abused women wait so long to make their break.

12) Cane river

Author

Tademy, Lalita

Earliest Publication Date

2001

Description

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Follows four generations of African American women from slavery to the early twentieth century as they struggle for economic security and the future of their families along the Cane River in rural Louisiana.

13) Cry, the beloved country

Author

Paton, Alan

Earliest Publication Date

1948

Description

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Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. Cry, the Beloved Country...

14) Daughter of fortune: a novel

Author

Allende, Isabel

Earliest Publication Date

1999

Description

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Raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, English orphan Eliza Sommers meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk with ambitious dreams. When gold is discovered in the hills of northern California, Chileans, including Joaquín, head north to seek their fortune. Eliza, pregnant with Joaquín's child, leaves behind everything she knows to follow her lover. In the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco,...

15) Drowning Ruth

Author

Schwarz, Christina

Earliest Publication Date

2000

Description

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Deftly written and emotionally powerful, Drowning Ruth is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart, of the dangers of keeping secrets and the explosive repercussions when they are exposed. A mesmerizing and achingly beautiful debut.
Winter, 1919. Amanda Starkey spends her days nursing soldiers wounded in the Great War. Finding herself suddenly overwhelmed, she flees Milwaukee and retreats to...

16) Ellen Foster

Author

Gibbons, Kaye, 1960-

Earliest Publication Date

1987

Description

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Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

17) Fall on your knees: a novel

Author

MacDonald, Ann-Marie, 1958-

Earliest Publication Date

1997

Description

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The story of a jinxed family, a catalog of rape, incest and death. James Piper abuses his daughter, atones by sending her to New York to study singing while he goes to war, she returns pregnant, dies in childbirth when her mother opens her to save her twins. One of the twins dies, mother commits suicide, the second twin contracts polio while being baptized in a creek by an aunt, the aunt is raped by James. A first novel set in Nova Scotia early this...

18) Here on Earth

Author

Hoffman, Alice

Earliest Publication Date

1997

Description

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A middle-aged woman, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, returns to her small Massachusetts hometown for the funeral of the housekeeper who raised her and finds herself thrust into the lives of the people she left behind.

19) ICY SPARKS

Author

Rubio, Gwyn Hyman

Earliest Publication Date

1998

Description

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A New York Times Notable Book and the March 2001 selection of Oprah's Book Club® !

Icy Sparks is the sad, funny and transcendent tale of a young girl growing up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky during the 1950’s. Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s beautifully written first novel revolves around Icy Sparks, an unforgettable heroine in the tradition of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or Will Treed in Cold

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20) I know this much is true

Author

Lamb, Wally

Earliest Publication Date

1998

Description

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#1 New York Times Bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection

"Thoughtful . . . heart-wrenching . . . . An exercise in soul-baring storytelling—with the soul belonging to 20th-century America itself. It's hard to read and to stop reading, and impossible to forget."—USA Today

Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life

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