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Recommended Reading

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Destined to be the definitive story for the general public as well as policymakers, The Great Lakes Water Wars is a balanced, comprehensive look behind the scenes at the conflicts and compromises that are the past — and future — of this globally significant resource.

Withdrawing into her photography and a job at a homeless shelter after being attacked while riding her bike, student Laurel Estabrook encounters Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of secret photos, but when Bobbie dies suddenly, Laurel is certain that the photos hide a dark family secret and embarks on an obsessive, potentially dangerous search for the truth.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

A wry account tracing an adventurous and arduous trek past the Appalachian Trail’s natural pleasures, human eccentrics, and offbeat comforts.

The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Ántonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation immigrants.

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Describes the author’s encounter with a baby gray whale that had become separated from its mother off the southern California coast, and relates her efforts to reunite it with its mother.

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Her life turned upside-down when a Japanese internment camp is opened in their small Colorado town, Rennie witnesses the way her community places suspicion on the newcomers when a young girl is murdered, an event that prompts Rennie’s own perspective change and the discovery of dangerous secrets.

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A history of the Great Lakes as told by the biologists, fishermen, sailors, and others who have experienced them firsthand traces the author’s experiences as a local resident and schooner crewperson.

In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, rashly deciding to protect his wife from their baby daughter’s affliction with Down Syndrome, turns her over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

A true story of love stronger than Nazi persecution. Things We Couldn’t Say is the true story of Diet Eman, a young Dutch woman, who, with her fiancé, Hein Sietsma, risked everything to rescue imperiled Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II.

Eleven-year-old asthmatic Reuben Land chronicles the Land family’s odyssey in search of Reuben’s older brother, Davy, who has escaped from jail before he can stand trial for the killing of two marauders who came to their Minnesota farm to harm the family.

Based on actual historical events, this novel follows the indomitable May Dodd as she travels to the Cheyenne, becomes the bride of Little Wolf, chief of that tribe, and struggles with living in and being loyal to two different worlds.

Set in twelfth-century England, this epic of kings and peasants juxtaposes the building of a magnificent church with the violence and treachery that often characterized the Middle Ages.

As six Californians get together to form a book club to discuss the novels of Jane Austen, their lives are turned upside down by troubled marriages, illicit affairs, changing relationships, and love.

An intimate memoir of growing up in Africa during the Rhodesian civil war of 1971 to 1979 describes the author’s life on farms in southern Rhodesia, Milawi, and Zambia, detailing her hardscrabble existence with an alcoholic mother, frequently absent father, and three lost siblings, as well as her fierce love for Africa.

Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

Traces the author’s decision to quit her job and travel the world for a year after suffering a midlife crisis and divorce, an endeavor that took her to three places in her quest to explore her own nature, experience fulfillment, and learn the art of spiritual balance.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

After stumbling upon his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork and being blamed for the killing, fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone, an autistic savant obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, decides to track down the real killer and turns to his detective hero to help him with the investigation, which brings him face to face with a family crisis.

A memoir of a New York City summer during the waning days of World War II recounts how the University of Iowa coed author and her best friend became the first women to work on the sales floor at Tiffany & Co., a job during which they basked in period culture, from USO dances and the Stork Club to nickel subway rides and the Eisenhower parade.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies.

From the unsettled lives of a small-town teacher struggling to raise two boys alone in the face of their mother’s retreat from life, a pregnant teenage girl with nowhere to go, and two elderly bachelor farmers emerges a new vision of life and family as their diverse destinies intertwine.

The author traces the boyhood enthusiasm for rockets that eventually led to a career at NASA, describing how he built model rockets in the family garage in West Virginia, inspired by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik.

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The author recounts the story of her life, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia and escape from a forced marriage to her efforts to promote women’s rights while surviving numerous threats to her safety.

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Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society.

Traces the unlikely friendship of Amir, a wealthy Afghanistani youth, and a servant’s son, in a tale that spans the final days of the nation’s monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in war-torn Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

When a plantation proprietor and former slave — now possessing slaves of his own — dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

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A thought-provoking portrait of world-renowned infectious disease expert Dr. Paul Farmer follows the efforts of this unconventional Harvard genius to understand the world’s great health, economic, and social problems and to bring healing to humankind.

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Follows the author’s family’s efforts to live on locally- and home-grown foods, an endeavor through which they learned lighthearted truths about food production and the connection between health and diet.

Traces the events that surrounded the 1984 murder of a woman and her child by fundamentalist Mormons Ron and Dan Lafferty, exploring the belief systems and traditions, including polygamy, that mark the faith’s most extreme factions and what their practices reflect about the nature of religion in America.

Sixty years after a book’s publication, its author remembers his lost love and missing son, while a teenage girl, named for one of the book’s characters, seeks her namesake, as well as a cure for her widowed mother’s loneliness.

One of the world’s oldest living craniopagus conjoined twins at the approach of her thirtieth birthday, bookish Rose Darlen attempts to pen her autobiography while remembering the joys and challenges of her life with sister Ruby, with whom she shares friendships in their small hometown.

A compelling account of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 brings together the divergent stories of two very different men who played a key role in shaping the history of the event — visionary architect Daniel H. Burnham, who coordinated its construction, and Dr. Henry H. Holmes, an insatiable and charming serial killer who lured women to their deaths.

The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

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An award-winning journalist traces a year during which she and her partner struggled with a pledge to avoid consumer spending practices in spite of their American conditioning, an effort that had a profound impact on their careers, family relationships, and personal identities.

Set in an Oz where a morose Wizard battles suicidal thoughts, the story of the green-skinned Elphaba, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West, profiles her as an animal rights activist striving to avenge her dear sister’s death.

Possessing encyclopedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper’s son Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a life boat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain.

Working in Gaborone, Botswana, sleuth Precious Ramotswe investigates several local mysteries, including a search for a missing boy and the case of the clinic doctor with different personalities for different days of the week.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

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In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which leads her on a lifelong search for truth and absolution.

An ardent nature lover describes her unique friendship with a pig named Christopher Hogwood, a once sickly piglet who helped her develop a new relationship with neighbors in her small-town community that gave her an anchor to family and home.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

Traces how the author, having been rescued and resuscitated by Himalayan villagers after a failed attempt to climb K2, worked to build schools that would particularly benefit the young girls who were forbidden an education by Taliban restrictions, an endeavor for which his life has been repeatedly threatened.

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A fictional tale inspired by the life of Marie Antoinette presents the story of a teenage empress’s daughter who is forced to leave her family home to marry the future king of France and who rebels against the formality and rigid protocol of court life.

Published more than sixty years following the author’s death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts — “A Storm in June,” set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and “Dolce,” set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

A coming-of-age memoir by a Vietnamese American recounts her struggles for an American identity in the pre-politically correct climate of the Midwest and her passion for American food in the face of her family’s Buddhist lifestyle.

A lyrical study of friendship, love, and loss chronicles the evolving relationship between Veronika, a young New Zealand writer struggling with a recent tragedy and trying to finish her novel, and Astrid, an older, reclusive neighbor who offers comfort in the form of companionship and home-cooked meals, in a debut novel set against the backdrop of small-town Sweden.

A story told from five different points of view — a mother receiving the evacuation order, her daughter on the train ride to the camp, the son in the desert internment camp, the family’s return home, and the final release of the father after years in captivity — chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

Having moved from one academic outpost to another throughout her childhood at the side of her aphorism-prone father, Blue van Meer attends the elite St. Gallway School in her senior year, where she falls in with a charismatic group of friends before the deaths of a teacher and student awaken her analytical instincts.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

In the aftermath of a horrific small-town school shooting, lawyer Jordan McAfee finds himself defending a youth who desperately needs someone on his side, while intrepid detective Patrick DuCharme works with a primary witness in the daughter of the superior court judge assigned to the case.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

The founder of the Kabul Beauty School describes the lives of women in the patriarchal society of Afghanistan from the perspective of the school and its students, offering profiles of such women as a newlywed who must fake her own virginity, a child bride sold into marriage to pay her family’s debts, and the wife of a Taliban member who pursues her training despite her husband’s abuse.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author’s works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.

In September 1943, fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father flee across the Alps into Italy with thousands of other Jewish refugees seeking safety, only to find an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allied forces, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italians struggling to survive the harsh realities of World War II.

An evocative story of friendship set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century China in which women suffered from foot binding, isolation, and illiteracy follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

Having spent six decades creating a series of alternate lives designed to bring her fame and fortune while hiding the truth about her tragic past, reclusive and enigmatic Vida Winter finds herself torn by young Margaret Lea’s simple request for the truth about her own birth.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

Ambitious teen Nella Castelluca, the daughter of a hard-working family from a small Italian village in Pennsylvania, aspires to live in genteel society far from the rigors of farm life, a dream that is compromised when a poet she loves disappears under scandalous circumstances and then returns just before Nella’s marriage to another man.

A new novel by the author of Bombay Time vividly captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two compelling women — Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class parsi housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family’s nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.

In her first case, private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.

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Four years after his daughter is abducted and evidence of her murder is found in an abandoned shack, Mackenzie Allen Philips returns to the shack in response to a note claiming to be from God, and has a life-changing experience.

Bag includes 2 additional Large Print copies

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Living with a foster family in Germany during World War II, a young girl struggles to survive her day-to-day trials through stealing anything she can get her hands on, but when she discovers the beauty of literature, she realizes that she has been blessed with a gift that must be shared with others, including the Jewish man hiding in the basement.