The Song Reader
10 best books like The Song Reader (Lisa Tucker): Cousin Bette, Truth and Beauty, Sacred Time, Small Island, My Life in Orange, The Little Locksmith, The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000, The Song of Names, Monsieur Proust, Extravagance
| Author | Honoré de Balzac |
| ISBN | 0375759077 |
Poor, plain spinster Bette is compelled to survive on the condescending patronage of her socially superior relatives in Paris: her beautiful, saintly cousin Adeline, the philandering Baron Hulot and their daughter Hortense. Already deeply resentful of their wealth, when Bette learns that the...
| Author | Ann Patchett |
| ISBN | 0060572159 |
Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy’s critically acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw...
| Author | Ursula Hegi |
| ISBN | 0743255992 |
The bestselling author of Stones from the River delivers her most ambitious and dramatic novel yet -- the unforgettable story of an endearing, but also flawed, Italian American family. In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parents' Studebaker, the Paradise...
| Author | Andrea Levy |
| ISBN | 0312424671 |
Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie,...
| Author | Tim Guest |
| ISBN | 1862077207 |
At the age of six, Tim Guest was taken by his mother to a commune modeled on the teachings of the notorious Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The Bhagwan preached an eclectic doctrine of Eastern mysticism, chaotic therapy, and sexual freedom, and enjoyed inhaling laughing gas, preaching from a dentist's...
| Author | Katharine Butler Hathaway |
| ISBN | 1558612394 |
The Little Locksmith, Katharine Butler Hathaway's luminous memoir of disability, faith, and transformation, is a critically acclaimed but largely forgotten literary classic brought back into print for the first time in thirty years. The Little Locksmith begins in 1895 when a specialist straps...
Like his National Book Award—winning United States, Gore Vidal’s scintillating ninth collection, The Last Empire, affirms his reputation as our most provocative critic and observer of the modern American scene. In the essays collected here, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and...
| Author | Norman Lebrecht |
| ISBN | 1400034892 |
Martin Simmonds’ father tells him, “Never trust a musician when he speaks about love.” The advice comes too late. Martin already loves Dovidl Rapoport, an eerily gifted Polish violin prodigy whose parents left him in the Simmonds’s care before they perished in the Holocaust. For a time the...
| Author | Céleste Albaret |
| ISBN | 1590170598 |
Céleste Albaret was Marcel Proust's housekeeper in his last years, when he retreated from the world to devote himself to In Search of Lost Time. She could imitate his voice to perfection, and Proust himself said to her, "You know everything about me." Her reminiscences of her employer present an intimate...
| Author | Gary Krist |
| ISBN | 0767913310 |
William Tobias Merrick, an energetic young man from the provinces, travels to the big city in a time of great optimism and ferment, hoping to make his mark on a frenzied, money-crazed society obsessed with the promise of new technologies.
The city in question is London in the 1690s; but it is...
| Author | Virginia Holman |
| ISBN | 0743255496 |
A startling memoir of a daughter's harrowing sojourn in the prison of her mother's mind and a moving portrait of a young woman defined by her mother's illness -- until at last she rekindles a family love that had lost its way.
"1974 was a bad year to go crazy," Virginia Holman writes in this astonishing,...
| Author | Greg Critser |
| ISBN | 0141015403 |
In this astonishing expose, journalist Greg Critser looks beyond the sensational headlines to reveal why nearly 60 percent of Americans are now overweight. Critser's sharp-eyed reportage and sharp-tongued analysis make for a disarmingly funny and truly alarming book. Critser investigates the...
| Author | Tony Vigorito |
| ISBN | 0156031221 |
"Just a Couple of Days may be the most unusual, the most original novel I have ever read." —TOM ROBBINS
"A lyrical, thoughtful, viral meme of a book. Read it!"
—CHRISTOPHER MOORE
Join cult favorite Tony Vigorito in his award-winning underground hit chronicling the party...
| Author | M.J. Hyland |
| ISBN | 1841956112 |
A powerful debut from a young Australian novelist that features one of the most likeable but contrary figures you are likely to meet in contemporary fiction life of poverty in Sydney. And when she is offered a place as an exchange student at a school in America it seems as if her dreams will be fulfilled....
