East Central Regional Library

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On the way home from a conference, Don Piper's car was crushed by a semi-truck that crossed into his lane. Medical personnel said he died instantly. While his body lay lifeless inside the ruins of his car, Piper experienced the glories of heaven, awed by its beauty and music.

Jay Winik explores the end of the Civil War in a panoramic narrative that takes readers on a journey through the tumultuous month of April 1865, showing that America's future rested on a few crucial decisions and twists of fate.

The decade following World War II becomes one of tragedy, excitement, and unexpected change for the five Novak children and the residents of their western Pennsylvania community of company houses, church festivals, and union squabbles.

Myla Goldberg

An ordinary girl with exceptional spelling abilities, Eliza Naumann embarks on the “rough and tumble” circuit of spelling bees, where her quirky family comes up against the harsh realities of the world.

Stanley Gordon West's latest novel is set in the early 1990s in the small eastern Montana town of Willow Creek.  Residents in this small Montana town learn life lessons from its long-losing high school basketball team and coach. 

This memoir of wonderful summers growing up at a Minnesota lake brings back nostalgic personal memories to the reader! This is the story of Anderson’s family and friends and their 30 summers spent with his parents at their summer cottage on Pelican Lake in Minnesota.  The Scandinavian relatives are quite a crew - much can be learned from them. The slower pace, home made food, fresh berries and produce - it all comes together with the water, boats, fishing and just plain living.

In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America . This book told nearly a century later is about her extraordinary journey.

This is a powerful and absorbing novel about the struggles of a proud North Dakota wheat-farming family during the Great Depression.  Hudson eloquently portrays George Custer, a determined and angry man who must battle both the land and the landlords; his hard-working wife, Rachel; and their young and vulnerable daughter, Lucy.  Through their compelling story looms a sense of a whole nation’s tragedy.

Establishing a bookmobile in a destitute Kenyan village, well-intentioned Fiona Sweeney inadvertently renews a decades old tribal feud involving a camel-powered bookmobile and prior efforts to promote local education.

Four young women haunted by unspeakable memories and losses, afraid to begin to hope, find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience even as the confront the challenge of re-creating themselves in a strange new country.

Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America 's place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.

Through police records, court transcripts, family papers, and extensive interviews, William Swanson has recreated Middle America’s “crime of the century,” the deadly plot by a husband that made headlines around the world in March 1963. 

When her fiancé, Mike is left paralyzed following a tragic accident, Carrie Bell begins to question her familiar world, her everyday life in Wisconsin and her relationships, and to rediscover her own identity.

At the center of the tale is Silvio, who in his younger years fled the boredom of the village for of travel and adventure, returns to live in a farmer's hovel in the middle of the woods. Much to his family's dismay, Silvio is content with his solitude. But when he attends the wedding of his favorite young cousin, Silvio begins to be drawn back into the complicated life of this small town. As the narration unfolds, we are given an intimate picture of the loves and infidelities, the scandals, the youthful ardor and regrets of age that tie Silvio to the long-guarded secrets of the past.

Minnesota’s poet laureate, Joyce Sutphen, grew up on a working dairy farm, and her poems recover this lost world, with all its beauty and order. This collection traces a shift in the rural landscape from horses to tractors, from haystacks to hay bales---and watches as time ages and changes the people who make up the story.

Kate Jacobs

Once a week, an eclectic group of women comes together at a New York City yarn shop to work on their latest projects and share the stories of their lives.  At the center of Walker and Daughter is the shop’s owner, Georgia, who is overwhelmed with juggling the store and single-handedly raising her teenage daughter.  She escapes the demands of life at the Friday Night Knitting Club, but when her daughter’s father shows up, her world is shattered.  The women in the club discover that what they’ve created isn’t just a knitting club, it’s a sisterhood. 

In the summer of 1873, Per Hansa, his wife Beret, their children, and three other Norwegian immigrant families—Tonseten and his wife Kjersti, Hans Olsa and his wife Sorine, and the Solum brothers—settle in the Dakota Territory. Per's family becomes lost when they separate from the other wagons, but they eventually reache their destination. They establish a small settlement along Spring Creek, and everyone starts building sod-houses.

Marilynne Robinson

Pulitzer Prize winner
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine , saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather. He tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.

January 1946:  Writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.  And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.

A true life novel about Lily Casey Smith (the author’s grandmother) who at age six helped her father break horses, at age fifteen left home to teach in a frontier town, and later as a wife and mother runs a huge ranch in Arizona.

Marianne Fedrikkson

Sweeping through one hundred years of Scandinavian history, this luminous story follows three generations of Swedish women – a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter – whose lives are linked through a century of great love and great loss.

 

The Irish landscape holds secrets past and present as archaeologist Cormac O'Callaghan and pathologist Nora Gavin encounter a mystery when a decapitated woman is found in the bogs who may be related to a recent mother/child disappearance.

After living all over the United States and teaching in China, Holm reapplies himself with gusto and grandiloquence to life as lived in his hometown, the minute Minneota, Minnesota. "The Music of Failure," the book's centerpiece essay, showcases most of Holm's themes: the values of the local past, the particulars of family chronicles, the uses of memory, and, in contrast to these qualities, America's rootless lack of history and its obsession with individual success.

Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project.

Set in the ethnic neighborhoods of Seattle during World War II and Japanese American internment camps of the era, this debut novel tells the heartwarming story of widower Henry Lee, his father, and his first love Keiko Okabe.

Part Irish, part Anishinaabe Indian, Corcoran "Cork" O'Connor is the former sheriff of Aurora, Minnesota (population 3,752).  As a blizzard buries Aurora and an old medicine man warns of the arrival of a blood-thirsty mythic beast called the Windigo, Cork must dig for answers hard and fast before more people, among them those he loves, will die.

On a visit to her childhood home in Texas, Julie Powell pulls her mother's battered copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking off the bookshelf. And the book calls out to her. Pushing thirty, living in a run-down apartment in Queens, and working at a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell is stuck. She invents a deranged assignment: in the space of one year, she will cook every recipe in the Julia Child classic, all 524 of them. No skips, no substitutions. And if it doesn't help her make sense of her life, at least she'll eat really, really well. How hard could it be?

A young kitchen boy, as the only surviving witness, tells his tale of the 1918 Bolshevik revolutionary murder of Czar Nicholas II and the rest of the Russian royal family.

Brunonia Barry

Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations.  Now the disappearance of two women is bringing Towner back home to Salem – and is brining to light the shocking truth about the death of her twin sister.

Kao Kalia Yang

Presents the journey from a refugee camp in Thailand to Minnesota and the hardships and joys of Kao Kalia’s Hmong family’s struggle to adapt to a strange culture while holding onto traditions that are passed down from her beloved grandmother

En route with his family from their home in India to Canada, their cargo ship sinks, and Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat -- alone, save for a few surviving animals, some of the very same animals Pi's zookeeper father warned him would tear him to pieces if they got a chance. Pi's seafaring journey becomes a test of survival, but of everything he's learned -- about man and beast, their creator, and the nature of truth itself.

The Long March is Communist China's founding myth. Seventy years afterwards, Sun Shuyun set out to retrace its steps and discovered the true history behind the legend. The facts: in 1934, in the midst of civil war, the Communist party and its 200,000 soldiers were forced from their bases by the Nationalists. After that, truth and legend begin to blur: led by Mao Zedong, the Communists set off on a strategic retreat to the distant barren north of China, thousands of miles away. Only one in five reached their destination, where, the legend goes, they gathered strength and returned to launch the new China in the heat of revolution.

Alice Sebold

In the second sentence, the narrator, Susie Salmon, announces, "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." A neighbor lures her to his hideaway as she heads home that day.  As the tragedy of Susie’s death unfolds in her own narration, with compelling but never vulgar detail, her family, friends and her community grieve and come to accept her death.   Appropriate for both teens and adults.

So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.

Pampered Margaret Macy flees London in disguise to escape pressure to marry a dishonorable man. With no money and nowhere else to go, she takes a position as a housemaid in the home of Nathaniel Upchurch, a suitor she once rejected in hopes of winning his dashing brother.

Offers the true story of the pioneers who crossed the Atlantic to establish a new world in Massachusetts, the challenges they faced upon their arrival, and their relationship with the local Native Americans.

Christopher Bohjalian

A talented midwife is arrested for murder when she saves a baby by performing a Caesarean section once she believes the mother has died--only to have her assistant insist later that the woman was still very much alive. Told in the mesmerizing voice of the midwife's daughter, Midwives depicts the aftermath of the tragedy.

The unforgettable story of an immigrant woman’s life on the Nebraska plains.  The novel portrays a community struggling with unforgiving terrain and a woman, Antonia Shimerda, who amid great hardship, stands as a timeless inspiration. 

A summer in a Southern town during the polio scare of the 1950s, the swimming pools closed, children are sent to the country to avoid contagion. The heroine is a white girl who stays behind, playing with the daughter of a black maid.

Traveling to Civil War-era Washington, D.C., to tend wounded soldiers and pursue her dream of becoming a surgeon, headstrong midwife Mary receives guidance from two smitten doctors and resists her mother's pleas for her to return home.

Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Kate begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.

Physiology and philosophy mesh in this poetic investigation of the five senses; essays explore synesthesia, food taboos, kissing and the power and diversity of music. "Rooted in science, enlivened by her own convincing sense of wonder, Ackerman's essays awaken us to a fresh awareness (Publisher’s Weekly).

In an attempt to understand the lives of Americans earning near-minimum wages, Ehrenreich works as a waitress in Florida , a cleaning woman in Maine , and a sales clerk in Minnesota .

Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens--until a student enters the local high school with an arsenal of guns and starts shooting, changing the lives of everyone inside and out. The daughter of the judge sitting on the case is the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened in front of her own eyes. Or can she?

Tim O’Brien

--MN Author

Originally published in 1975, this novel explores the relationship between two brothers: one who went to Vietnam and one who stayed at home. As the two struggle against an unexpected blizzard in Minnesota's remote north woods, what they discover about themselves and each other will change both of them forever.

In this saga of the American heartland at the turn of the century, a young woman fights to build her Nebraska homestead, as she remembers Carl Lindstrom, the dreamer who left the prairie.

At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her.

Jim Fergus

An account of the controversial “Brides for Indians” clandestine government program to assimilate Native Americans into white culture is told here in  fiction form.

 

Beginning with a failed suicide pact between two teenagers, Emily and her boyfriend Chris Harte, this story traces the growth of the complex relationship between the kids and their families, combining elements of mystery with the sensitive exploration of a tragic subject.

Discovering a cache of valuable Native American artifacts while appraising an estate in New Hampshire , Faye Travers investigates the history of a ceremonial drum, which possesses spiritual powers and changes the lives of people who encounter it.

Leif Enger

--MN Author

The 11-year-old boy at the center of this Aitkin County (MN) author’s first novel, Rube, recalls the events of his childhood, in small-town Minnesota circa 1962, and captures the poetic, verbal stoicism of the northern Great Plains. "Here's what I saw," Rube warns his readers. "Here's how it went. Make of it what you will." And Rube sees plenty.
Amazon.com’s Claire Dederer says, “Enger finds something quietly heroic in the bred-in-the-bone Minnesota decency of America's heartland.”

Jodi Picoult

The discovery of a dead baby under a pile of old blankets in Aaron Fisher’s barn sets off a scandal in Amish country and investigation that could implicate fisher’s eighteen-year-old daughter.

 

Through interviews with O'Keeffe's friends and acquaintances, by delving into the published an unpublished sources and letters, Lisle has created a vivid and sensitive portrait of O'Keeffe as an artist and woman.

The stories of a small Cape Cod postmistress and an American radio reporter stationed in London collide on the eve of the United States's entrance into World War II, a meeting that is shaped by a broken promise to deliver a letter.

The wife and children of Noah, who has been directed by God to build an ark, witness the ark's construction and assist in gathering myriad animals before finding themselves trapped within the ark during a cataclysmic flood

Barbara Kingsolver

Three interwoven stories of human love amid the lush mountains and farms of southern Appalachia celebrate the prodigal spirit of human nature, and of nature itself.

Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy -- the effects of which not only divide Leigh’s family, but polarize the entire community.

Struggling with single parenthood and a scandal that cost him his political career, Bernard Doyle fights his disappointment with his adopted sons' career choices before a violent event forces the members of his family to reconsider their priorities.  Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you've never even met.

Sarah, a ten-year-old girl, is taken with her parents by the French police as they go door-to-door arresting Jewish families in Paris 1942.  Desperate to protect her younger brother, Sarah locks him in a bedroom cupboard – their secret hiding place and promises to come back for him as soon as they are released.  Sixty years later, Sarah’s story intertwines with that of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist investigating the roundup. 

Sue Monk Kidd

The richly drawn novel is Lily's coming-of-age story, shining with the power of women around her, all seeking forgiveness and healing, and all discovering what family is really about.

The Minnesota State Fair-the beloved home of 4-H exhibits, Midway rides, and everything on a stick. The festival fun is riding high until the newly crowned Milkfed Mary, Queen of the Dairy, a Battle Lake native, is brutally murdered while her regal likeness is carved in butter. Can Mira James, covering the fair for the Battle Lake Recall, expose a deadly State Fair secret and win a blue ribbon for caging a killer? You bet your last deep-fried Nut Goodie!

Mackenzie Allen Phillips' youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack's world forever.

Who knew that a German submarine U-869, long thought to have been sunk off Gibraltar in 1945, was actually sunk by its own torpedo less than 60 miles from Brielle , New Jersey ? No one--until 1991,when two death-cheating wreck-divers began exploring the boat's wrecked hull, 230 feet underwater.

In the summer of 1994, a workman at the historic mansion of railroad baron James J. Hill in St. Paul, Minnesota, stumbles on a long-hidden wall safe.  There, inside the safe, is a handwritten manuscript bearing the signature of John H. Watson, M.D.
The manuscript contains the story of how Sherlock Holmes and Watson traveled to Minnesota to track a murderous arsonist—known only as the Red Demon—who is threatening both Hill and his Great Northern Railway. The novel is set against the backdrop of the real, devastating Hinckley forest fire of 1894.

Silencing Sam finds Riley Spartz incensed when a gossip columnist makes disparaging remarks about her actions as a wife and widow. So incensed, she makes a rather public display of it. This doesn’t sit well when that columnist turns up dead. And fingers keep pointing to Riley.

1997 winner of the general nonfiction National Book Critics Circle Award. Lia Lee was born in 1981 to a family of recent Hmong immigrants, and soon developed symptoms of epilepsy. By 1988 she was living at home but was brain dead after a tragic cycle of misunderstanding, overmedication, and culture clash: "What the doctors viewed as clinical efficiency the Hmong viewed as frosty arrogance." The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions, written with the deepest of human feeling.

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life.  As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fall, she receives a devastating diagnosis:  early onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

During World War II, a family finds life turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the strangers.

This multiple biography is centered on Lincoln’s mastery of men and how it shaped the most significant presidency in nation’s history.  The author illuminates Lincoln’s political genius, as the one-term congressman rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals to become president.

Marjorie Peterson survived a lifetime of seemingly insurmountable challenges, including being indentured by a family who took her off the orphan train in November 1906.  Marjorie’s indomitable spirit allowed her to make significant personable contributions to the world that tested her so hard as a child and as an adult.  Ann Zemke, her granddaughter, tells Marjorie’s heartwarming story through this narrative and the very special quilt she made in her grandmother’s memory.

Dottie Connell farms her family's farm in rural Ohio alone, having sacrificed love and family for land she does not own. When the daughter of her childhood friend is left in her care, she must face the past she has worked 15 years to forget.

Anna Schlemmer’s daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life. Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame.

Audrey Niffenegger

A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrate tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who involuntarily travels through time, and Claire Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course.  Henry and Claire’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love.

The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.  A Pulitzer Prize winner.

In this explosive and timely novel, T. Coraghessan Boyle explores an issue that is at the forefront of the political arena. He confronts the controversy over illegal immigration head-on, illuminating through a poignant, gripping story the people on both sides of the issue, the haves and the have-nots.

In 1993 a mountaineer named Greg MOrtenson drifted into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram mountains after a failed attempt to climb K2. Moved by the inhabitants' kindness, he promised to return and build a school. Over the next decade Mortenson built 55 schools in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban.

A chronicle of a two-decade friendship between Patchett and poet Lucy Grealy. It is a portrait of unwavering commitment through love, fame, drugs and despair.

The story of the Lucas family, who live in a beautiful and remote part of Wisconsin inhabited by working-class European immigrants and the Ojibwe. By 1967 the Lucas farm has fallen into disrepair, thanks to the hard drinking of John Lucas, who brutalizes his wife and two sons. When the eldest, James, escapes by enlisting to fight in Vietnam , he leaves young Bill alone to protect his mother with only his own will and the spirit of his brother to guide him.

A tale of survival follows two old women who are abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine.  They now must survive on their own or die trying.  Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful.  

Originally drawn to the priesthood by the mystery, purity and sensual fabric of the Catholic Church, as well as by its promise of a safe harbor from his violent father, James Dressler finds himself – just a few years after his ordination – attracted again to his first love, Betty Garcia.  Torn between these completing loves, and haunted by his heritage, James finds himself at a crossroads. 

Geneva Jordan , megastar of stage, screen and television, has a command performance in Minnesota , where she agrees to look after her thirteen-year-old nephew, a boy with Down's syndrome while his parents take a long-overdue vacation. Discovering an old scrapbook she and her sister created in their youth starts Geneva thinking of things beyond fame.

Elizabeth Berg

On a cross-country journey to see her long-estranged mother, Ginny remembers the summer she turned twelve, with its family pains and growth.

Enjoying an active but lonely rural life, seventy-year-old Percy allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn and transform his quiet home into a lively, youthful community that compels him to reexamine the choices he made after his wife's death.

Examines the experience of six families and the Great Plains communities affected by the dust storms of the Depression.  It draws on the memories of those who survived black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones.

Documents the true story of the Warsaw Zoo keepers and resistance activists, Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who in the aftermath of Germany's invasion of Poland saved the lives of hundreds of Jewish citizens by smuggling them into empty cages and their home villa.