Special Collections

If you liked I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb...

Description: Readers who loved I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb should check out these great reads. #adults #readalike


Showing 1 through 10 of 10 results

I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world.

Date Added: 05/18/2020


The Girls

by Lori Lansens

In Lansens's second novel, readers come to know Rose and Ruby, 29-year-old conjoined twins. When one of the girls decides to write her autobiography, the distinct personalities of the two emerge to reveal their contradictory longing for independence and their unwavering togetherness.

Date Added: 05/18/2020


The Distant Hours

by Kate Morton

From the New York Times bestselling author of Homecoming comes a haunting tale of long-buried secrets and the twists of fate that can alter lives forever.This enthralling romantic thriller pays homage to the classics of gothic fiction, spinning a rich and intricate web of mystery, suspense, and lost love. It starts with a letter, lost for half a century and unexpectedly delivered to Edie&’s mother on a Sunday afternoon. The letter leads Edie to Milderhurst Castle, where the eccentric Blythe spinsters live and where, she discovers, her mother was billeted during World War II. The elder Blythe sisters are twins and have spent most of their lives caring for their younger sister, Juniper, who hasn&’t been the same since her fiancé jilted her in 1941. Inside the decaying castle, Edie searches for her mother&’s past but soon learns there are other secrets hidden in its walls. The truth of what happened in &“the distant hours&” has been waiting a long time for someone to find it.

Date Added: 05/18/2020


The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

The international publishing sensation of 1997 -- translated into 18 languages -- a magical, sophisticated tour de force.

The God of Small Things heralds a voice so powerful and original that it burns itself into the reader's memory. Set mainly in Kerala, India, in 1969, it is the story of Rahel and her twin brother Estha, who learn that their whole world can change in a single day, that love and life can be lost in a moment. Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they seek to craft a childhood for themselves amid the wreckage that constitutes their family.

Man Booker Prize winner

Date Added: 05/18/2020


Night Road

by Kristin Hannah

Jude Farraday is a happily married, stay-at-home mom who puts everyone's needs above her own. Her twins, Mia and Zach, are bright and happy teenagers. When Lexi Baill enters their lives, no one is more supportive than Jude. A former foster child with a dark past, Lexi quickly becomes Mia's best friend. Then Zach falls in love with Lexi and the three become inseparable. But senior year of high school brings unexpected dangers and one night, Jude's worst fears are confirmed: there is an accident. In an instant, her idyllic life is shattered and her close-knit community is torn apart. People and Jude demand justice, and when the finger of blame is pointed, it lands solely on eighteen-year-old Lexi Baill. In a heartbeat, their love for each other will be shattered, the family broken. Lexi gives up everything that matters to her, the boy she loves, her place in the family, the best friend she ever had while Jude loses even more. When Lexi returns, older and wiser, she demands a reckoning. Long buried feelings will rise again, and Jude will finally have to face the woman she has become. She must decide whether to remain broken or try to forgive both Lexi and herself. Night Road is a vivid, emotionally complex novel that raises profound questions about motherhood, loss, identity, and forgiveness. It is an exquisite, heartbreaking novel that speaks to women everywhere about the things that matter most.

Date Added: 05/18/2020


Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

In this stunning novel, Darin Strauss combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history’s most famous twins. Born in Siam in 1811—on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River—Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world’s stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage. Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss’s narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century’s most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty. .

Date Added: 05/18/2020


Sisterland

by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, returns with a mesmerizing novel of family and identity, loyalty and deception, and the delicate line between truth and belief. From an early age, Kate and her identical twin sister, Violet, knew that they were unlike everyone else. Kate and Vi were born with peculiar "senses"--innate psychic abilities concerning future events and other people's secrets. Though Vi embraced her visions, Kate did her best to hide them. Now, years later, their different paths have led them both back to their hometown of St. Louis. Vi has pursued an eccentric career as a psychic medium, while Kate, a devoted wife and mother, has settled down in the suburbs to raise her two young children. But when a minor earthquake hits in the middle of the night, the normal life Kate has always wished for begins to shift. After Vi goes on television to share a premonition that another, more devastating earthquake will soon hit the St. Louis area, Kate is mortified. Equally troubling, however, is her fear that Vi may be right. As the date of the predicted earthquake quickly approaches, Kate is forced to reconcile her fraught relationship with her sister and to face truths about herself she's long tried to deny. Funny, haunting, and thought-provoking, Sisterland is a beautifully written novel of the obligation we have toward others, and the responsibility we take for ourselves. With her deep empathy, keen wisdom, and unerring talent for finding the extraordinary moments in our everyday lives, Curtis Sittenfeld is one of the most exceptional voices in literary fiction today.PRAISE FOR CURTIS SITTENFELD American Wife "A smart and sophisticated portrait . . . Sittenfeld has an astonishing gift for creating characters that take up residence in readers' heads."--The Washington Post "A gripping epic of public and private lives . . . a gem."--Good Housekeeping "The novel is a gift, a sweeping exploration of a woman's odyssey from obscurity to fame and the painful decisions she must make along the way."--The Miami Herald Prep "Prep conveys the inner world of an entirely typical teenage girl with remarkable warmth. . . . One of the most tender and accurate portraits of adolescence in recent memory."--San Francisco Chronicle "Prep may be as addictive as M&Ms, but it's also a tart and complex tale of social class, race, and gender politics."--The Boston Globe "Hilarious . . . a richly textured narrative."--The New Yorker The Man of My Dreams "[Sittenfeld] writes with humor, intelligence, insight and heart. She's also as good at sharp social satire as she is at tender mercies."--The Boston Globe "Pure, elegant prose; true, perfect dialogue; and emotion so searing it might just leave a scar."--The Miami Herald

Date Added: 05/18/2020


Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

A masterly debut novel, visceral in its power, heartbreaking in its tenderness. Transporting the reader from the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, Cutting for Stone is a thrilling epic of conjoined twins, doctors and patients, temptation and redemption, home and exile--and a riveting family story, irresistibly charged with strange happenings, humour and pathos, that grabs you from its harrowing opening and never lets go. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin sons of a secret union between an Indian nun and a British surgeon at Missing hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother s death in childbirth and their father s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the brothers come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics their passion for the same woman that tears them apart and forces Marion to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as a surgical intern at an underfunded, overcrowded hospital. When the past catches up with him, Marion must trust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him, and the brother who betrayed him. Cutting for Stone is both an unforgettable story of lives cut in half and a gripping evocation of the power, intimacy, danger and curious beauty of the ancient art that is at its heart.

Date Added: 05/18/2020


The Prince of Tides

by Pat Conroy

The stirring saga of a man's journey to free his sister--and himself--from a tragic family historyTom Wingo has lost his job, and is on the verge of losing his marriage, when he learns that his twin sister, Savannah, has attempted suicide again. At the behest of Savannah's psychiatrist, Tom reluctantly leaves his home in South Carolina to travel to New York City and aid in his sister's therapy. As Tom's relationship with her psychiatrist deepens, he reveals to her the turbulent history of the Wingo family, and exposes the truth behind the fateful day that changed their lives forever. Drawing richly from Pat Conroy's own troubled upbringing, The Prince of Tides is a sweeping and powerful story of how unlocking the past can be the secret to overcoming the darkest of personal demons.

Date Added: 05/18/2020


Her Fearful Symmetry

by Audrey Niffenegger

From the author of the #1 bestselling The Time Traveler's Wife, a spectacularly compelling novel--set in and near Highgate Cemetery in London, about the love between twins, men and women, ghosts and the living.Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls' aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie. The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including--perhaps--their aunt.

Date Added: 05/18/2020



Showing 1 through 10 of 10 results