Speaking of Books: Fiction Ho-Ma

He is a Professor with a traumatic head injury leaving him with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper hired to care for him.

The story of Ruth and her sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt.

It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die.

A crumbling way of life amid the adventures of a rising insurgency and terrorist threats; a family copes amid the lush beauty of northeast India in the mid-1980s.

Three sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a cliff in the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper report does not mention that a fourth sister lives, or that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship.

This deeply felt story of two sisters struggling to survive amid the collapse of technology and society is at once a classic tale of mythic proportions--and a modern myth with a timely message.

Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

About the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery, the story of the black farmer and former slave who becomes proprietor of his own plantation and owner of his own slaves.

Set in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina in 1929, this book chronicles an ordinary woman's struggle for dignity and her rights in a textile mill.

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his 50th birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself and making connections with the past.

Two young men-- one of them on death row for a crime he did not commit-- forge a bond as they grow to realize the importance of resisting. A young teacher must examine his family’s expectations against his own sense of what is right. Life in 1940’s Louisiana sheds light on our history of racism.

In 1974 Manhattan, a radical young Irish monk struggles with personal demons while making his home among Bronx prostitutes, a group of mothers shares grief over their lost Vietnam soldier sons, and a young grandmother attempts to prove her worth.

After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship in the Pacific, one solitary lifeboat remains, carrying a hyena, a zebra, a female orangutan, a Bengal tiger, and a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi.

Forced into an overcrowded lifeboat after a mysterious explosion on their trans-Atlantic ocean liner, newly widowed Grace Winter battles the elements and her fellow survivors and remembers her husband, Henry, who set his own safety aside to ensure Grace's.

A novel set on a remote Australian island, where a childless couple live quietly running a lighthouse, until a boat carrying a baby washes ashore.

A haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers--one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.

No longer a footnote to Frank Lloyd Wright, Mamah Borthwick Cheney shines in this blend of fact and fiction. The dramatic love story reveals the profound influence of the woman who left her family to live out her passion, in spite of public disgrace.

It's 1949 and two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the big arena of New York, where they are workers by day, stars of dance halls by night.