Full House: Crazy About the Future by Devra Speregen

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two young boys growing up n Kabul. Rasided in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir’s father’s servent, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country of a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him. The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of fathers over sons – their love, their sacrifices, and their lies. Written against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But with the devestation, Khaled Hosseini also gives us hope: through the novel’s faith in power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows for redemption.

Those memorable days of push lawn mowers, corner grocery stores, big-band music, burning leaves and filling stations that check the oil and wash the windshield. On this nostalgic canvas, Stanley West has set his riveting and heartwarming novel, the devastating story of young Sandy Meyer. Bright and outgoing, having grown up through the Great Depression and the World War II year, she is suddenly give one perplexing clue to her past that sets her on an incredible and harrowing journey in search of her lost family. A pilgrimage that brings her face to face with nerve-shattering suspense, unbearable terror and the magnificent capacity of the human heart. Surrounded by juicy and wacky characters, and without the knowledge of her adoptive parents, her devil-may-care friends or the boy she desperately loves, she summons the courage to doggedly follow where the faint trail leads. When she stumbles upon the buried past and long-hidden treachery, she is confronted by and evil that knows her by name and drawn into a darkness she never knew existed. Tenaciously refusing to quit, she discovers a heart-breaking heroism and an extraordinary triumph that changes her life forever.

In Paradise – her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of “the one all black town worth the pain,” assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town’s ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void “Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose.” Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.

“Last Night I Dreamt I Went To Manderley Again.” So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past ther beeches, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten…her suite of rooms never touched, her clothes ready to be worn, her servant — the sinister Mrs. Danvers — still loyal. And as an eerie presentiment of evil tightened around her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter began her search for the real fate of Rebecca…for the secrets of Manderley.