Richard Poe
1) East of Eden
Author
Language
English
Description
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 Hamilton's--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. The story of two brothers, Aron is a clean-cut model student, engaged to be married, the pride of his hardworking father. Cal is a rebellious loner, sternly rejected...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
World-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a mysterious symbol seared into the chest of a murder victim, where he discovers evidence of the resurgence of an ancient brotherhood with a vendetta against the Catholic Church.
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Called a "magnificently crafted story...brimming with wisdom" by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the...
Author
Language
English
Description
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West.
Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian...
Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian...
Author
Language
English
Description
After a NASA satellite discovers a mysterious object buried beneath the Arctic ice, a team of scientists is called in to verify the authenticity of the find. What they discover, however, is a plot of unimaginable deception that threatens to plunge the world into controversy--a vicious, high-ranking conspiracy that may lead all the way to the White House. A shocking scientific discovery. A conspiracy of staggering brilliance. A thriller unlike any...
Author
Language
English
Description
Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a fictional breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomized by Almondine, Edgar's lifelong friend and ally. But with the unexpected return of Claude, Edgar's paternal uncle, turmoil consumes the Sawtelles' once peaceful home. When Edgar's father dies suddenly,...
7) The crossing
Author
Series
Border trilogy volume 2
Language
English
Description
In the 1930s, two teenage brothers whose ranch in New Mexico was raided by bandits, cross into Mexico to search for stolen horses. The novel follows them through the revolution-torn countryside, meeting soldiers, peasants, priests and thieves, all proffering advice. By the author of All the pretty horses.
8) Underworld
Author
Language
English
Description
Our lives, our half century. Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence. Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Frank Bascombe travels to the site of his former home on the shore, visits his ex-wife, who is suffering with Parkinson's, and meets a dying former friend.
Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America people...
Author
Language
English
Description
Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills three thousand years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws. It outlines the laws of power in their unvarnished essence, synthesizing the philosophies of Machiavelli, Sun-tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and other great thinkers. Some laws teach the need for prudence, the virtue of stealth, and many demand the total absence of mercy, but like it or not, all have applications...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Journalist Annabel Reed-Smith is at the Library of Congress researching a diary of Christopher Columbus’ voyage. When a scholar studying the same subject is killed in the stacks nearby, Annabel begins to suspect that the library may contain information someone would do anything to keep secret. Best-selling author Margaret Truman uses the great landmarks of the Capitol City as vivid settings for her taut mysteries.
Author
Series
Keller volume 5
Language
English
Description
With a new wife and a baby on the way, Keller, a.k.a. Nicholas Edwards, is done killing people for money until a phone call from Dot draws him back into the old game, taking him to Dallas to settle a domestic dispute to New York, where people might remember him.
14) Hit and run
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
A hit man accused of assassinating the governor of Ohio must clear his name and outwit the real killer who's out to gun him down.
15) Drop City
Author
Language
English
Description
It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier—the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska—in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naïve optimism, the inhabitants of “Drop City” arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other...
16) Ungifted
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Due to an administrative mix-up, troublemaker Donovan Curtis is sent to the Academy of Scholastic Distinction, a special program for gifted and talented students, after pulling a major prank at middle school.
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
It's the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, May 23rd, and the small town of Promise Falls, New York, has found itself in the midst of a full-blown catastrophe. Hundreds of people are going to the hospital with similar flu-like symptoms--and dozens have died. Investigators quickly zero in on the water supply. But the question for many, including private investigator Cal Weaver, remains: Who would benefit from a mass poisoning of this town? Meanwhile,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Investigation and report of the burglary at the Watergate Hotel that culminated with President Richard Nixon's resignation from office.
"With a new foreword by the authors for the fiftieth anniversary of the event, the most devastating political detective story of the century, two Washington Post reporters, whose brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation smashed the Watergate scandal wide open, tell the behind-the-scenes drama the way it really...
19) Good faith
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Greed. Envy. Sex. Property. In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American obsessions with the expertise of a master carpenter. Forthright, likable Joe Stratford is the kind of local businessman everybody trusts, for good reason. But it's 1982, and even in Joe's small town, values are in upheaval: not just property values, either. Enter Marcus Burns, a would-be master of the universe whose years with...
20) Be mine
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"From Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford: the final novel in the world of Frank Bascombe, one of the most indelible characters in American literature Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway....