Good Books

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare's life ... here is a novel ... so gorgeously written that it transports you." --The Boston Globe In 1580's England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this "exceptional historical novel" (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR--THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW WINNER OF THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, GQ, The Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews    NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLER  Tommy Orange's "groundbreaking, extraordinary" (The New York Times) There There is the "brilliant, propulsive" (People Magazine) story of twelve unforgettable characters, Urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who converge and collide on one fateful day. It's "the year's most galvanizing debut novel" (Entertainment Weekly).   As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow--some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent--momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle's death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle's memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.   There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It's "masterful . . . white-hot . . . devastating" (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard--a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it's destined to be a classic.

2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction

Katherine Ashley, the daughter of a poor country squire, happily secures an education and a place for herself in the Tudor court of Henry VIII. As a dying favor to the doomed Anne Boleyn, Kat becomes governess and surrogate-mother to the young Elizabeth Tudor ... ultimately emerging as the lifelong confidante to Queen Elizabeth I.

Spanning a thousand years, and following the shifting fortunes of two families though the ages, this is the epic saga of Rome, the city and its people.

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family's Florentine palazzo.

17-year-old Griet must work to support her family, so she becomes a maid in the house of Johannes Vermeer, where she attracts the master painter's attention.

England, 1554. Henry VIII is dead. The country is divided, Catholic against Protestant. Henry's eldest daughter Mary, a fervent Catholic, is Queen.

Critically acclaimed, this is the award winning true tale of a Jewish family who flee the Nazi regime in 1938 and learns to cope with their new life, and each other, on a remote farm in Kenya.

Francisco Manoel da Silva, 19th century, gun-toting Brazilian bandit known as the Cobra Verde, is unknowingly hired by the owner of a sugar plantation to keep his slaves in check, but instead, the Cobra manages to sleep with the landowner's daughters and impregnate them.