The Stone Diaries is a 1993 award winning novel by Carol Shields. It is the fictional autobiography about the life of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through marriage and motherhood, Daisy struggles to find contentment, never truly understanding her life's true purpose. The book's title may have been inspired by Pat Lowther's poetry collection A Stone Diary (1977). Lowther's murder in 1975 was the inspiration for Shields' earlier novel Swann: A Mystery (1987). Part of the setting for the book is the historic Vinegar Hill neighborhood of Bloomington, Indiana
The Crossing, publicized as the second installment of McCarthy's Border Trilogy, is the initiation story of Billy Parham and his younger brother Boyd (who are 16 and 14 respectively when the novel opens). The novel, set just before and during World War II, is structured around three round-trip crossings that Billy makes from New Mexico into Mexico. Each trip tests Billy as he must try to salvage something once he fails in his original goal. On both his first and last quest he is reduced (or perhaps exalted) to some symbolic futile gesture in his attempt, against all obstacles, to maintain his integrity and to be true to his moral obligations.
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague is a 2001 international bestselling historical fiction novel by Geraldine Brooks. It was chosen as both a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book. The novel is based on the history of the small Derbyshire village of Eyam that, when beset upon by the plague in 1666, quarantines itself in order to prevent the disease from spreading further. The Plague that hit Eyam is historically similar to the Black Plague in Europe.
Troubled but compelling antihero Sebastian St. Cyr returns in a thrilling new mystery as he joins the daughter of his most bitter enemy in a murder investigation that uncovers layers of hypocrisy and depravity in the highest echelons of power in Regency England. A taut, richly imagined novel that will keep readers on the edge of their seats as it deepens the portrait of this dashing and charismatic sleuth.
In Gibbons's classic tale, first published in 1932, a resourceful young heroine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized by Flora's mysterious aunt, who controls the household from a locked room. Flora's confident and clever management of an alarming cast of eccentrics is only half the pleasure of this novel.
