Birds of Paradise
10 best books like Birds of Paradise (Diana Abu-Jaber): Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction, Good Graces, Northwest Corner, River House, The Winters in Bloom, Take One Candle Light a Room, Damage Control, In Malice, Quite Close, Bone Worship, The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn
| Author | Elissa Schappell |
| ISBN | 0743276701 |
Elissa Schappell's Use Me introduced us to a writer of extraordinary talent, whose "sharp, beautiful, and off-kilter debut" (Jennifer Egan) garnered critical acclaim and captivated readers. In Blueprints for Building Better Girls, her highly anticipated follow-up, she has crafted another provocative,...
| Author | Lesley Kagen |
| ISBN | 0525952381 |
Lesley Kagen returns with the sequel to her New York Times bestselling debut, Whistling in the Dark.
Whistling in the Dark captivated readers with the story of ten-year-old Sally O'Malley and her sister, Troo, during Milwaukee's summer of 1959. The novel became a New York Times bestseller...
| Author | John Burnham Schwartz |
| ISBN | 1400068452 |
The New York Times Book Review called Reservation Road “a triumph,” and the novel was universally acclaimed. Now, in a brilliant literary performance by one of our most compelling and compassionate writers, John Burnham Schwartz reintroduces us to Reservation Road’s unforgettable characters...
| Author | Sarahlee Lawrence |
| ISBN | 0982569130 |
An exquisite blend of memoir and nature writing, River House is the story of a young woman returning home to her family’s ranch and building a log house with the help of her father. An avid river rafter, Sarahlee Lawrence grew up in remote central Oregon and, by the age of twenty-one, had rafted some of...
| Author | Lisa Tucker |
| ISBN | 1416575405 |
In bestselling author Lisa Tucker’s latest, a family discovers that it’s only when the walls between the present and past crumble that the future can bloom.
Together for over a decade, Kyra and David Winter are happier than they ever thought they could be. They have a...
Take One Candle Light a Room
| Author | Susan Straight |
| ISBN | 0307379140 |
From the author of A Million Nightingales (“a writer of exceptional gifts and grace”—Joyce Carol Oates) comes a luminous new novel about the forces that tear families apart and the ties that bind them together.
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Fantine Antoine is a travel writer, a profession that keeps her...
| Author | Denise Hamilton |
| ISBN | 0743296745 |
Maggie Silver is solidly middle class, with a mortgage to pay and an ill mother to support. She does her best to scramble up the ladder at an exclusive, high-powered PR firm in Southern California, whose clients are movie stars and famous athletes. Now, Maggie is being asked to take on her toughest client...
| Author | Brandi Lynn Ryder |
| ISBN | 0670022799 |
A haunting and sophisticated debut in which priceless art and unspeakable desires converge.
French ex-pat Tristan Mourault is the wealthy, urbane heir to a world- renowned collection of art-and an insatiable voyeur enamored with Karen Miller, a fifteen-year-old girl from a working-class...
| Author | Elizabeth Eslami |
| ISBN | 1605980749 |
Jasmine Fahroodhi has always been fascinated by her enigmatic Iranian father. With his strange habits and shrouded past, she can't fathom how he ended up marrying her prim American mother.
But lately love in general feels just as incomprehensible. After a disastrous romance sends her...
The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn
| Author | Lucette Lagnado |
| ISBN | 0061803677 |
“[Lagnado writes] in crystalline yet melodious prose.”
—New York Times
Lucette Lagnado’s acclaimed, award-winning The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit (“[a] crushing, brilliant book” —New York Times Book Review) told the powerfully moving story of her Jewish family’s...
| Author | Maxine Swann |
| ISBN | 1594488304 |
A glittering, energetic novel about three women-each experiencing an awakening in the gloriously conflicted and sexy city of Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires is a city of Parisian affections and national anxiety, of amorous young lovers, seedy ports, flooded slums, and a dazzling social elite. Into this...
| Author | Lucia Perillo |
| ISBN | 0393083535 |
Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back.
An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and...
| Author | Devon Pearse |
| ISBN | 0982697104 |
What does it feel like to stare into the face of madness? Or to anticipate your own? Would you drive away your only love? Could you pretend it didn't matter? How far would you go to protect a friend, or to avenge a death?
Ten years ago, Devon gave up the love of her life, fearing she would one day fall...
| Author | Jeremy Hawkins |
| ISBN | 1619024853 |
Video stores are dying. But most of you don’t care. You’ve got your Netflix and your DVR, so why deal with VHS tapes or scratched DVDs? Why deal with the grumpy guy at the worn-down independent video store?
That grumpy guy is Waring Wax, and he’s usually too drunk to worry about his declining...
| Author | Stephen Wetta |
| ISBN | 0399157522 |
A Crime in the Neighborhood, told with the deadpan humor of Nick Hornby-a wonderful novel about a boy genius whose brother may, or may not, be a murderer. It's 1967. Jack Witcher is a twelve-year-old boy genius living in a Virginia suburb at an address the entire neighborhood avoids. Jack's father has...
| Author | Aimee Phan |
| ISBN | 0312322682 |
A young woman journeys back to Vietnam to uncover family secrets—in this first novel from the author of We Should
Cherry Truong’s older brother has been exiled to live with distant relatives in Vietnam. As Cherry journeys from Los Angeles to her family’s homeland to bring him back, she...
| Author | Jean Thompson |
| ISBN | 1439175888 |
From National Book Award–finalist Jean Thompson comes a mesmerizing, decades-spanning saga of one ordinary American family—proud, flawed, hopeful—whose story simultaneously captures the turbulent history of the country at large.
In The Year We Left Home, Thompson brings together...
| Author | Marie Mutsuki Mockett |
| ISBN | 1555975410 |
Three generations of women intersect in this evocative debut novel
My mother always told me that there is only one way a woman can be truly safe in this world. And that is to be fiercely, inarguably and masterfully talented.
No one knows who fathered eleven-year-old Satomi, and...
| Author | Clyde Edgerton |
| ISBN | 0316117595 |
In 1963, at the age of 17, Dwayne Hallston discovers James Brown and wants to perform just like him. His band, the Amazing Rumblers, studies and rehearses Brown's Live at the Apollo album in the storage room of his father's shop in their small North Carolina town. Meanwhile, Dwayne's forbidden black...
| Author | Carolyn Cooke |
| ISBN | 0307594734 |
From the O. Henry Award–winning author of the story collection The Bostons—a New York Times Notable Book, Los Angeles Times Book of the Year and winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers—an exquisite first novel set at a disintegrating New England prep school.
It’s...
| Author | David A. Kelly |
| ISBN | 0375868852 |
Now batting third—book #3 in a brand-new early chapter book mystery series where each book is set in a different American ballpark!
It's spring break and Kate and Mike are off to Los Angeles to visit Kate's dad, a scout for the Dodgers. But all is not sunny in L.A.—strange things have been...
Heather and Mack McKay seem to have it all: wealth, a dream house in the suburbs, and two adorable children along with the nannies to raise them. But their marriage has lost its savor: she is a frustrated writer and he longs for a cultural trophy to hang on his belt.
During a chance encounter in...
| Author | Moni Mohsin |
| ISBN | 0307889246 |
Jane Austen's Emma, transported to the outrageous social melee of 21st-century Lahore.
Our plucky heroine's cousin, Jonkers, has been dumped by his low-class, slutty secretary, and our heroine has been charged with finding him a suitable wife -- a rich, fair, beautiful, old-family type....
Imperial Dreams: Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre
| Author | Tim Gallagher |
| ISBN | 1439191522 |
Naturalist Tim Gallagher journeys deep into the savagely beautiful Sierra Madre, home to rich wildlife and other natural treasures—and also to Mexican drug cartels—in a dangerous quest to locate the rarest bird in the world—the possibly extinct Imperial Woodpecker, the largest of all carpinteros....
| Author | Michelle Wildgen |
| ISBN | 0312571410 |
Hard-shelled, career-minded Greta is the newest and least likely member of a sustainable foods cooperative house in Madison, Wisconsin. Shortly after she joins Karin and Hal in their stately residence near campus, the husband Greta left appears on their porch, drunk, and the reason for her sudden...
