Reader's Choice: Fiction: Schwab - Woolf

A Faustian bargain comes with a curse that affects the adventure Addie LaRue has across centuries.

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.

An actress immerses herself in the role of a pioneering woman aviator who disappeared in Antarctica.

Betrayals emerge and romances develop when eight friends wait out the pandemic in a country house.

Jane Smiley's most famous novel--King Lear on an Iowa farm--which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. A Thousand Acres spins the most fundamental themes of truth, justice, love, and pride into a universally acclaimed masterpiece

In 1873, a Scottish housekeeper to a once-famous novelist is captivated by a trial in which a lower-class butcher from Australia claims to be the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title.

Traces the fortunes of four generations of one family as they attempt to build a life for themselves in the American West.

Two young couples, Sid and Charity and Larry and Sally, from different backgrounds--East and West, rich and poor--befriend each other in 1937 Madison, Wisconsin.

A repressed memory triggers Astrid Strick to weigh the outcomes of her parenting of her now-grown children.

As the pandemic starts, Lucy Barton and her ex-husband go to a small town in Maine, where they confront their shared history.

Strout's iconic heroine Lucy Barton recounts her complex, tender relationship with William, her first husband -- and longtime, on-again-off-again friend and confidante.

Here is Olive, strangely content in her second marriage, still in an evolving relationship with her son and his family, encountering a cast of memorable characters in the seaside town of Crosby, Maine.

A stunning debut in which the narrator is a young gay boy living in poverty in Glasgow with his alcoholic mother. It won the Booker Prize.

Complications ensue when a New York journalist downshifts to become a mom in a small town and hires a senior at the local women’s college to babysit.

A sweeping novel about two sisters--one the matriarch of a boisterous Irish Catholic family, the other a cloistered nun, hidden from the world--and the secret that drove them apart.

In 1940s Italy, teenager Pino Lella joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps and falls for a beautiful widow, he also becomes the personal driver of one of the Third Reich's most powerful commanders.

Ebullient escapades propel this picaresque novel in which four boys embark on a journey across America where they encounter colorful characters and fulfill a quest.

A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society.

At a gala party thrown by her parents, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed. Again. She's been murdered hundreds of times, and each day, Aiden Bishop is too late to save her. Doomed to repeat the same day over and over, Aiden's only escape is to solve Evelyn Hardcastle's murder and conquer the shadows of an enemy he struggles to even comprehend.

French Braid is a stirring, uncannily insightful novel of tremendous warmth and humor exploring the ups and downs of a Baltimore family from the 1950s to the pandemic present.

The story of two Indian women, one a victim of a brutal crime and the other an Americanized journalist returning to India to cover the story, and the courage they inspire in each other

A widow working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium is aided in solving a mystery by a giant Pacific octopus living there.

Three generations of a family living on South India’s Malabar Coast suffer the loss of a family member by drowning.

Little Dog writes a letter to a mother who cannot read, revealing a family history that began before he was born. It details a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.

Inspired by a suffragist ancestor who starved herself to promote the integration of Cambridge University, Evie refuses to marry and Dorothy defies a ban on photographing the bodies of her dead Iraq War soldier sons, a choice that embarrasses Dorothy's daughters.

Set in the years 1950-1970 in a changing America and London, follows two married couples - ministers and academics - whose intricate bonds of faith and friendship, jealousy and understanding, are tested by the birth of an autistic child.

A Texas town on the verge of an oil boom in 1976 becomes divided when a teenage girl is brutally attacked.

An elegant portrait of desire and betrayal in Old New York. One of Wharton’s most famous novels—the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize—exquisitely details a tragic struggle between love and responsibility in Gilded Age New York.

Ray Carney, a family man who sells furniture on 125th Street, gets a new clientele made up of vicious and unsavory characters.

Follows the harrowing experiences of two African-American teens at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape.

In this moving debut novel, two estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother's death and her hidden past--a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California and ends with her famous black cake.

Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, the story is a thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.

The five Foss children find their lives changed forever when their parents leave them alone on the family shantyboat one stormy night. Rill Foss, just twelve years old, must protect her four younger siblings as they are wrenched from their home on the Mississippi and thrown into an infamous orphanage.

The events of the story occupy a single June day in Central London as wealthy and fashionable society hostess Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party she is to give that evening.