Stones from the River
10 best books like Stones from the River (Ursula Hegi): Lord of the Flies, The Handmaid's Tale, White Oleander, Breath, Eyes, Memory, Cane River, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, Icy Sparks, Fall on Your Knees, The Master Butchers Singing Club, Angle of Repose
| Author | William Golding |
| ISBN | 0140283331 |
At the dawn of the next world war, a plane crashes on an uncharted island, stranding a group of schoolboys. At first, with no adult supervision, their freedom is something to celebrate; this far from civilization the boys can do anything they want. Anything. They attempt to forge their own society, failing,...
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
| 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...
At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's...
| Author | Lalita Tademy |
| ISBN | 0446678457 |
A New York Times bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick-the unique and deeply moving saga of four generations of African-American women whose journey from slavery to freedom begins on a Creole plantation in Louisiana.
Beginning with her great-great-great-great grandmother, a slave owned...
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 | Gwyn Hyman Rubio |
| ISBN | 0142000205 |
Icy Sparks is the sad, funny and transcendent tale of a young girl growing up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky during the 1950’s. Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s beautifully written first novel revolves around Icy Sparks, an unforgettable heroine in the tradition of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or Will...
| Author | Ann-Marie MacDonald |
| ISBN | 0743466527 |
They are the Pipers of Cape Breton Island — a family steeped in lies and unspoken truths that reach out from the past, forever mindful of the tragic secret that could shatter the family to its foundations. Chronicling five generations of this eccentric clan, Fall on Your Knees follows four remarkable...
| Author | Louise Erdrich |
| ISBN | 0060837055 |
From National Book Award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author Louise Erdrich, a profound and enchanting new novel: a richly imagined world “where butchers sing like angels.”
Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the...
| Author | Wallace Stegner |
| ISBN | 0140169300 |
Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface...
| 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 | Robert Morgan |
| ISBN | 0743203631 |
Young Julie Harmon works "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will...
| Author | Alice Hoffman |
| ISBN | 0425169693 |
After nearly twenty years of living in California, March Murray, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, returns to the sleepy Massachusetts town where she grew up to attend the funeral of Judith Dale, the beloved housekeeper who raised her. Yet returning to her hometown also brings her back...
| 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 | 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 | 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 | Bill Cosby |
| ISBN | 0590956183 |
Cosby, Bill, and Varnette P. Honeywood. The Treasure Hunt. New York: Scholastic, 1997. Print. Easy Reader. The Treasure Hunt is about a young boy who wants to find what he is good at. So he talks to his Grandma about it and she says that he needs to go on a treasure hunt to find what he is looking for. He goes...
| 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 | Kaye Gibbons |
| ISBN | 0375703063 |
When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked...
| 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...
