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American Fiction Books
Build your taste profile and get better suggestions. You've rated 0 of 32 books. Want more suggestions? Launch Quick Rate- The Notebook
By Nicholas Sparks, 2004
ISBN 0446605239
At thirty-one, Noah Calhoun, back in coastal North Carolina after World War II, is haunted by images of the girl he lost more than a decade earlier. At twenty-nine, socialite Allie Nelson is about to marry a wealthy lawyer, but she cannot stop thinking about the boy who long ago stole her heart.
- Memoirs of a Geisha
By Arthur Golden, 1997
ISBN 1400096898
In this literary tour de force, novelist Arthur Golden enters a remote and shimmeringly exotic world. For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess.
- The Help
By Kathryn Stockett, 2009
ISBN 0399155341
Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger.
- The Time Traveler's Wife
By Audrey Niffenegger, 2003
ISBN 015602943X
A dazzling novel in the most untraditional fashion, this is the remarkable story of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures...
- The Road
By Cormac McCarthy, 2006
ISBN 0307472124
The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed all civilization and, apparently, almost all life on earth.
- The Lovely Bones
By Alice Sebold, 2002
ISBN 0316044938
"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her...
- No Country for Old Men
By Cormac McCarthy, 2007
ISBN 0307387135
In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
- She's Come Undone
By Wally Lamb, 1992
ISBN 0671021001
In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye.
- My Sister's Keeper
By Jodi Picoult, 2004
ISBN 9780743454537
My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth trying to discover who you really are, if that quest makes you...
- Everything Is Illuminated
By Jonathan Safran Foer, 2003
ISBN 0060529709
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the...
- Middlesex
By Jeffrey Eugenides, 2007
ISBN 0312427735
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse...
- Beloved
By Toni Morrison, 2004
ISBN 1400033411
Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free.
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
By Jonathan Safran Foer, 2006
ISBN 0618711651
Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history.Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission...
- The Things They Carried
By Tim O'Brien, 1990
ISBN 0618706410
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
By Michael Chabon, 2001
ISBN 0312282990
Samuel Klayman -- self-described little man, city boy, and Jew -- first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship.
- The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver, 2008
ISBN 0061577073
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds...
- The Art of Racing in the Rain
By Garth Stein, 2009
ISBN 0061537969
A heart-wrenching but deeply funny and ultimately uplifting story of family, love, loyalty, and hope—a captivating look at the wonders and absurdities of human life . . . as only a dog could tell it.
- Empire Falls
By Richard Russo, 2002
ISBN 0375726403
With Empire Falls Richard Russo cements his reputation as one of America’s most compelling and compassionate storytellers. Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect.
- Rabbit, Run
By John Updike, 1996
ISBN 0449911659
Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is unfulfilling, his marriage is moribund, and he tries to find happiness with another woman. But happiness is more elusive than a medal, and Harry must continue to...
- Shanghai Girls
By Lisa See, 2009
ISBN 1400067111
In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw...
- The Human Stain
By Philip Roth, 2001
ISBN 0099422131
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist.
- The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
By David Wroblewski, 2008
ISBN 0061374229
Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin. For generation...more[close] Born mute, speaking only in sign, Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents on their farm in remote northern Wisconsin.
- Underworld
By Don DeLillo, 2003
ISBN 0684848155
Underworld is a postmodern novel published in 1997 by Don DeLillo. It was nominated for the National Book Award, was a best-seller, and is one of DeLillo's better-known novels. Underworld is a non-linear narrative that has many intertwined themes. A central character is Nick Shay, a waste...
- Winter's Tale
By Mark Helprin, 2005
ISBN 0156031191
New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake--orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob...
- Interpreter of Maladies
By Jhumpa Lahiri, 2000
ISBN 0618101365
Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the...
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
By Mary Ann Shaffer, 2009
ISBN 0385341008
January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.
- Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
By Cormac McCarthy, 2001
ISBN 0679641041
"The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner," writes esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom in his Introduction to the Modern Library edition.
- Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories
By Raymond Carver, 1989
ISBN 0679722319
A major collection of Carver's short stories, including seven new stories written shortly before the author's death in 1988.
- Gilead
By Marilynne Robinson, 2006
ISBN 031242440X
Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart.
- American Pastoral
By Philip Roth, 1998
ISBN 0375701427
As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in...
- The Known World
By Edward P. Jones, 2006
ISBN 0061159174
One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, The Known World is a daring and ambitious work by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones. The Known World tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in...
- Libra
By Don DeLillo, 1991
ISBN 0140127119
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When 'history' presents itself in the form of two...
