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In the mid-1960s, Ana Cancion marries Juan Ruiz, a man twice her age, for the chance to come to the United States. Juan's controlling nature quickly turns abusive, but when he leaves for the Dominican Republic because of civil unrest, Ana is finally free to move about the city, under the care of Juan's brother Cesar. Ana begins to imagine a new life for herself, but must decide between her own happiness and her family's future.
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""Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature, that of Virginia Woolf's beloved masterpiece of time, memory, and the city. In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell- shock and on the brink of madness....
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Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...
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Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar....
5) Middlemarch
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English
Description
Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and, the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past.
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Set after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the novel is inspired by the story of an African American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky late January 1856 by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. In the novel, the protagonist Sethe is also a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave...
7) Emma
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English
Description
As daughter of the richest, most important man in the small provincial village of Highbury, Emma Woodhouse is firmly convinced that it is her right--perhaps even her "duty"--To arrange the lives of others. Considered by most critics to be Austen's most technically brilliant achievement, "Emma" sparkles with ironic insights into self-deception, self-discovery, and the interplay of love and power.
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It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a handmaid. She is hoping the commander makes her pregnant because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she had a job of her own, a husband, and a child, but all of that is gone now.
9) Passing
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English
Description
"The beautiful, elegant, and ambitious Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. A light-skinned African American married to a white man unaware of her racial heritage, Clare has severed all ties to her past to become part of white, middle-class society. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, as light-skinned as Clare, has chosen to remain within the African American community. Married to a successful doctor and the mother of two boys, Irene refuses...
10) The testaments
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English
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"In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades. When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her--freedom, prison or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story more than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown,...
11) Kindred
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English
Description
Dana, a young modern black woman is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him, as he will father the daughter who will become Dana's ancestor. After the first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect...
12) The great Gatsby
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An undisputed masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, this stunning, lavishly designed new edition of The Great Gatsby is perfect for Fitzgerald lovers and classics collectors alike. In his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the paradisiacal illusions of the post-World War One generation, only to shatter them. At the heart of this piercing and defining novel of the Jazz Age is the eponymous romantic, holding tight to...
14) Jane Eyre
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English
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"Jane Eyre is poor, parentless and plain. Her future looks bleak. Jane's aunt and cousin detest her. Life at Lowood School is cruel and dangerous. What inner strength can the young Jane find? Seeking adventure and independence, Jane sets out alone. Is her new master, Mr Rochester, all that he seems? What secret does he keep locked in the third storey, where strange laughter haunts the nights? In her search for affection, Jane faces horror, cruelty,...
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Of all Jane Austen's books, Pride and Prejudice has earned a special place in the hearts of the reading public as her best-loved and most intimately known novel. From its famous opening sentence the story of the Bennet family and of the novel's two protagonists, Elizabeth and Darcy, told with a wit that its author feared might prove 'rather too light and bright, and sparkling', delights its most familiar readers as thoroughly as it does those who...
16) Persuasion
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English
Description
Austen's last novel is the crowning achievement of her matchless career. Her heroine, Anne Elliot, a woman of integrity, breeding and great depth of emotion, stands in stark contrast to the brutality and hypocrisy of Regency England. Includes a new Introduction by Margaret Drabble, famed novelist and editor of The Oxford Companion to the English Language.
17) If the shoe fits
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English
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"In this modern-retelling of Cinderella, plus-size Cindy dreams of becoming a shoe designer. But when a spot opens up on her stepmother's famous reality dating TV competition, Cindy is thrust into the spotlight in ways she never thought possible"--
20) BUtterfield 8
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English
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Description
A bestseller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 was inspired by a news account of the discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman washed up on a Long Island beach. Was it an accident, a murder, a suicide? The circumstances of her death were never resolved, but O'Hara seized upon the tragedy to imagine the woman's down-and-out life in New York City in the early 1930s.