Ellen Foster

Author	Janet Fitch
ISBN	0316182540

Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes--each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its...

Author

Pearl Cleage

Acclaimed Playwright, essayist and columnist Pearl Cleage breaks new ground in African American women's literature--with a debut novel that sings and crackles with life-affirming energy as it moves the reader to laughter and tears.

As a girl growing up in Idlewild, Michigan, Ava Johnson...

Author	Ernest J. Gaines
ISBN	0375702709

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shoot out in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university,...

Author	Clyde Edgerton
ISBN	0345419073

She has as much business keeping a stray dog as she would walking across Egypt–which not so incidentally is the title of her favorite hymn. She’s Mattie Rigsbee, an independent, strong-minded senior citizen who, at seventy-eight, might be slowing down just a bit. When teenage delinquent Wesley...

Author	Reynolds Price
ISBN	0684846942

0ne of the most feisty, spellbinding and engaging heroines in modern fiction captures the essence of her own life in this contemporary American odyssey born of red-clay land and small-town people. We meet Kate at a crucial moment in middle age when she begins to yearn to see the son she abandoned when...

Author	Connie May Fowler
ISBN	0449911446

My name is Avocet Abigail Jackson. But because Mama couldn't find anyone who thought Avocet was a fine name for a child, she called me Bird. Which is okay by me. She named both her children after birds, her logic being that if we were named for something with wings then maybe we'd be able to fly above the shit...

Author	Sheri Reynolds
ISBN	0425162443

Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 1997: Members of the Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind spend their days and nights serving the Lord and waiting for the Rapture--that moment just before the Second Coming of Christ when the saved will be lifted bodily to heaven and the damned...

Author	Padgett Powell
ISBN	0805013709

Simons Everson Manigault ('You say it 'Simmons.' I'm a rare one-m Simons") lives with his mother, an eccentric professor (known as the Duchess), on an isolated and undeveloped strip of South Carolina coast. Convinced that her son can be a writer of genius, the Duchess has immersed Simons in the literary...

Author	Bret Lott
ISBN	0671042572

2.5

I started this book years ago during my "Read every single book from Oprah's book club" stage. Looking back now I realize that I really enjoyed some of them but I didn't finish quite a few of them. I picked this one up a few weeks ago, skimming through it to refresh my memory as best I could and then...

Author	Lee Smith
ISBN	0345382919

"She writes lyric, luminous prose; her craft is so strong it becomes transparent, and, like the best of storytellers, she knows how to get out of the way so that the story can tell itself."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Moses Bailey, a preacher's son, forbade his fiddle-loving wife Kate Malone to...

Author	Melinda Haynes
ISBN	0671774670

Capturing all the rueful irony and racial ambivalence of small-town Mississippi in the late 1950s, Melinda Haynes' celebrated novel is a wholly unforgettable exploration of family, identity, and redemption. Mother of Pearl revolves around twenty-eight-year-old Even Grade, a black man who grew...

Author	A. Manette Ansay
ISBN	0060897848

In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilty and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field,...

Author	Jane Hamilton
ISBN	0385265700

I am really surprised by all of the negative reviews of this book. I think it is so strange that the characters are discounted as "white trash", their story thus, uninteresting or too dreary. While the story is by no means a happy one it is highly engrossing and worth telling. Hamilton's narrator Ruth is...

Author	Breena Clarke
ISBN	0316899984

The acclaimed bestseller--a selection of Oprah's Book Club--that brings vividly to life the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, circa 1925, and a community reeling from a young girl's tragic death.




River, Cross My Heart marks the debut of a wonderfully gifted new storyteller...

Author	Mary McGarry Morris
ISBN	0140244824

Songs in Ordinary Time is set in the summer of 1960 - the last of quiet times and America's innocence. It centers on Marie Fermoyle, a strong but vulnerable woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for the dangerous con man Omar Duvall. Marie's children are Alice, seventeen...

Author	Sidney Poitier
ISBN	0061357901

In this luminous memoir, a true American icon looks back on his celebrated life and career.  His body of work is arguable the most morally significant in cinematic history, and the power and influence of that work are indicative of the character of the man behind the many storied roles. Here, Sidney...

Author	Bill Cosby
ISBN	0590956175

[Scholastic Readers Level 3]

This easy-to-read story about friendship by comedian and storyteller Bill Cosby is now a Scholastic Reader!
Little Bill and his friends LOVE the TV show Space Explorers. And so when the new Space Explorers video game comes out, they each want a copy.
But...