Reader's Choice: Fiction In-Ma

In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, an embittered old judge wants only to retire in peace. But his life is upended when his sixteen-year-old orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep.

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.

Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger. Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook’s differences are impossible to ignore.

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.

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.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

The million-copy bestseller Lilac Girls introduced the real-life heroine Caroline Ferriday. Now Lost Roses, set a generation earlier and also inspired by true events, features Caroline’s mother, Eliza, and follows three equally indomitable women from St. Petersburg to Paris under the shadow of World War I.

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.

A grumpy yet lovable man finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous young family moves in next door.

Old world meets new in this poignant tale of the power of love and magic of song. Erdrich’s gentle voice weaves many stories around the German WWI sniper who becomes the butcher and the singer and the lover of Argus, North Dakota.