The Book You’ve Recommended Most

Alice Bliss

Laura Harrington

When Alice Bliss learns that her father is being deployed to Iraq, she’s heartbroken. Alice idolizes her father, loves working beside him in their garden, accompanying him on the occasional roofing job, playing baseball. When he ships out, Alice is facedwith finding a way to fill the emptiness he has left behind. Matt will miss seeing his daughter blossom from a tomboy into a full-blown teenager. Alice will learn to drive, join the track team, go to her first dance, and fall in love, all while trying tobe strong for her mother, Angie, and take care of her precocious little sister, Ellie.

Atlas Of The Heart
Mapping Meaningful Connection And The Language Of Human Experience

Brene Brown

In Atlas of the Heart, Brown takes us on a journey through eighty-seven of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances—a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection.

Before We Were Yours

Lisa Wingate

Learning that her grandmother was a victim of the corrupt Tennessee Children’s Home Society, attorney and aspiring politician Avery Stafford delves into her family’s past and begins to wonder if some things are best kept secret.

Class Mom

Laurie Gelman

Frowned upon by conservative fellow PTA members for her past as a single parent, Jen reluctantly agrees to become class mom during her youngest child’s kindergarten year, a role that is challenged by parent drama, hypersensitive allergies, and a former flame.

Crossroads

Jonathan Franzen

It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who’s been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.

Democracy In Chains
The Deep History Of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America

Nancy MacLean

A scholarly expose of the ideas of Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan and multibillionaire Charles Koch explores their role in the radical right’s six-decade campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education and minimize restrictions on the wealthy.

East Of Eden

John Steinbeck

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California’s Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families–the Trasks and the Hamiltons–whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

Eat That Frog
21 Great Ways To Stop Procrastinating And Get More Done In Less Time

Brian Tracy

There’s an old saying that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re done with the worst thing you’ll have to do all day. For Tracy, eating a frog is a metaphor for tackling your most challenging task—but also the one that can have the greatest positive impact on your life.

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Tom Wolfe

One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the “Transcontinental Bus Tour” from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, staging impromptu jam sessions, dodging the Feds, and meeting some of the most revolutionary figures of the day.

Galapagos

Kurt Vonnegut

The ghost of a decapitated shipbuilder wryly observes the decline of the human race as reflected by a group of shipwreck survivors, including a biology teacher, a bomb-radiated wife of a Japanese computer genius, and a gold digger, a motley band whose fates are shaped by infertility and a local tribe of cannibals. Reissue.

Hiding In Plain Sight
The Incredible True Story Of A German-Jewish Teenager’s Struggle To Survive In Nazi-Occupied Poland

Betty Lauer

An extraordinary story of strength, resilience, hope, and salvation, Betty Lauer’s book chronicles Berta Weissberger’s six-year terrifying odyssey in Nazi-occupied Poland. After dying her hair blonde and studying the catechism in hopes of passing as Christian Poles, Berta, her mother, and her sister live a life of constant vigilance and fear. It is only through her abiding faith in a higher power that she is enabled to survive while hiding in plain sight.

A Higher Call

Adam Makos

December, 1943: A badly damaged American bomber struggles to fly over wartime Germany. At the controls is twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown. Half his crew lay wounded or dead on this, their first mission. Suddenly, a Messerschmitt fighter pulls up on the bomber’s tail. The pilot is German ace Franz Stigler—and he can destroy the young American crew with the squeeze of a trigger… What happened next would defy imagination and later be called ‘the most incredible encounter between enemies in World War II.’

This true story includes Sgt. Richard Pechout, a lifelong resident of Berlin. He served as a B-17 Flying Fortress radio operator aboard the “Ye Old Pub,” as described in A Higher Call, and beame a prisoner of war in Germany. He is a Silver Star and Purple Heart Recipient.

The House In The Cerulean Sea

TJ Klune

Given a curious classified assignment to evaluate the potential risks posed by six supernatural orphans, a case worker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth bonds with an enigmatic caregiver who hides dangerous secrets.

The Invisible Life Of Addie Larue

V.E. Schwab

Making a Faustian bargain to live forever but never be remembered, a woman from early eighteenth-century France endures unacknowledged centuries before meeting a man who remembers her name.

Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini

The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father’s servant, caught in the tragic sweep of history, The Kite Runner transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.

Leaving Time

Jodi Picoult

Abandoned by a grief-stricken father and scientist mother who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, thirteen-year-old Jenna Metcalf approaches a disgraced psychic and a jaded detective in the hopes of finding answers.

The Light We Lost

Jill Santopolo

Lucy and Gabe, two Columbia University students who meet as seniors, decide they want their lives to mean something, launching a thirteen-year journey of dreams, betrayals, and love that brings Lucy to a point where she must make a life-altering choice.

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante

The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists, the unforgettable Elena and Lila.

The Nightingale

Kristin Hannah

Reunited when the elder’s husband is sent to fight in World War II, French sisters Vianne and Isabelle find their bond as well as their respective beliefs tested by a world that changes in horrific ways.

The Passage

Justin Cronin

A security breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment that only six-year-old orphan Amy Harper Bellafonte can stop.

The Power Of Now

Eckhart Tolle

A counselor and spiritual teacher shares the secret of his own self-realization and the philosophy for living in the present he has developed.

The Remains Of The Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

It is the summer of 1956. Stevens, ageing butler of the late Lord Darlington, embarks on a motoring tour of Wales. His travels are disturbed, however, by the memories of a lifetime of service.

The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid

When an aging and reclusive Hollywood icon selects an unknown magazine reporter to write her life story, the baffled journalist forges deep ties with the actress during a complicated interview process that exposes their tragic common history.

Pillars Of The Earth

Ken Follett

The spellbinding epic set in twelfth-century England, The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of the lives entwined in the building of the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known—and a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother.

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse

A young Indian boy leaves his home in hopes of finding enlightenment with the wise Goutama, which in this story is the Buddha. After learning what he can from Goutama, he decides to go off into the busy city, and leads a life of greed and lust. When he realizes that the lifestyle is not fulfilling, and he reflects on his life, he goes to a river and contemplates suicide. However, it is here that Siddhartha meets a man who will change his life and help lead him to enlightenment, in this classic coming of age story about finding meaning and purpose.

Small Great Things

Jodi Picoult

When her reluctance to treat the newborn of a white supremacist couple results in the child’s death, a black nurse is placed on trial and is aided by a white public defender who urges her not to bring up race in the courtroom.

This Tender Land

William Kent Krueger

Fleeing the Depression-era school for Native American children who have been taken from their parents, four orphans share a summer marked by struggling farmers, faith healers and lost souls.

Untamed

Glennon Doyle

An activist, speaker and philanthropist offers a memoir wrapped in a wake-up call that reveals how women can reclaim their true, untamed selves by breaking free of the restrictive expectations and cultural conditioning that leaves them feeling dissatisfied and lost.

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi

A Ivy League-trained, award-winning young neurosurgeon describes his how after receiving a terminal diagnosis with lung cancer he explored the dynamics of his roles as a patient and care provider, the philosophical conundrums about a meaningful life and how he wanted to spend his final days.

Where The Crawdads Sing

Delia Owens

For years, rumors of the ‘Marsh Girl’ have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life—until the unthinkable happens.

Your Money Or Your Life
9 Steps To Transforming Your Relationship With Money And Achieving Financial Independence

Vicki Robin, Joseph Dominguez

Offers a nine-step program for living a more meaningful life by taking control of one’s finances, showing readers how to get out of debt, save money, reorder priorities, live well for less, and convert problems into opportunities.