MCL - Oprah's Book Club

In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...

In a 1960s small Vermont town, a boy sees a man commit a murder, then later that day sees the murderer come calling on his mother with flowers. So begins a tense tale of a con man exploiting a love-starved woman with an alcoholic husband and three children, and a boy who keeps a murder secret to avoid ruining his mother's happiness.

Set in a small German town and spanning both world wars, this novel tells the story of ordinary people living in extraordinary times.

PEN/Hemingway Award Winner: An “enthralling” novel of a woman trapped within a tragically dysfunctional family (Entertainment Weekly).
 
From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Excellent Lombards and A Map of the World, this is “an extraordinary story of a family’s disintegration [that] will be compared to Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres”...

"Watch your brother, " Beth Cappadora tells Vincent, 7. Five minutes later she returns, "Where is Ben?" It is the moment every parent fears and it arrives to a mother of three in Chicago. The novel follows the family as year after year the hope of finding Ben recedes. Nine years later a boy knocks on their door looking for lawn work. It can't be. It is.

After a decade of elegant pleasures and luxe living with the Atlanta brothers and sisters with the best clothes and biggest dreams, Ava Johnson has temporarily returned home to Idlewild-her fabulous career and power plans smashed to bits by cold reality. But what she imagines to be the end is, instead, a beginning. Because, in the ten-plus years since Ava left, all the problems of the big city have come to roost in the sleepy North Michigan community...

Thirty-two-year-old Alice Goodwin begins the unremarkable June day much as every other on the small dairy farm. Suddenly, within the span of minutes, Alice's map of her world is forever altered when her neighbor's two-year-old-left with Alice for the morning-wanders away and drowns in the farm pond. In the style of Jane Smiley and Sue Miller, award-winning author Hamilton composes an emotionally charged story of guilt, atonement and love that immerses...

The acclaimed bestseller--a selection of Oprah's Book Club--that brings vividly to life the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, circa 1925, a community reeling from a young girl's tragic death. Five-year-old Clara Bynum is dead, drowned in the Potomac River in the shadow of a seemingly haunted rock outcropping known locally as the Three Sisters. River, Cross My Heart, which marks the debut of a wonderfully gifted new storyteller, weighs...

Twenty-eight-year-old Even Grade is a Black man who was orphaned as a child. 15-year-old Valuable Korner is a white girl who might as well have been orphaned. Petal, Mississippi, circa 1956, seems an unlikely spot for these two to connect, but a friendship forged across race lines is just one of many miracles waiting to happen in this small Southern town. Their paths cross through Joody Two Sun, a seer with amazing powers. Forming something that resembles...

A pilot's wife is taught to be prepared for the late-night knock at the door. But when Kathryn Lyons receives word that a plane flown by her husband, Jack, has exploded near the coast of Ireland, she confronts the unfathomable--one startling revelation at a time. Soon drawn into a maelstrom of publicity fueled by rumors that Jack led a secret life, Kathryn sets out to learn who her husband really was, whatever that knowledge might cost. Her search...