
|
Sacred Hearts
Dunant, Sarah
The year is 1570, and in the convent of Santa Caterina, in the Italian city of Ferrara, noblewomen find space to pursue their lives under God's protection. But any community, however smoothly run, suffers tremors when it takes in someone by force. And the arrival of Santa Caterina's new novice sets in motion a chain of events that will shake the convent to its core.
|

|
Sarah's Key
Rosnay, Tatiana de
Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond.
|

|
School of Essential Ingredients
Bauermeister, Erica
When eight students gather in Lillian's Restaurant for cooking classes, they create more than just good food. They also create an atmosphere that allows each of them to deal with life's challenges, both in and out of the kitchen.
|

|
Secret Kept, A
De Rosnay, Tatiana
It's been thirty years since Antonie's and Melanie's mother died. But when a visit to the sea at Noirmoutier Island triggers painful memories of their haunting childhood--and Melanie lies in the hospital recovering from a near fatal accident--Antoine must confront his past and also his troubled relationships with his own children.
|

|
Secrets of Eden: A Novel
Bohjalian, Christopher
After the murder of Alice Hayward and the suicide of her husband, Reverend Stephen Drew flees the pulpit and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about angels. Heather, identifying deeply with Alice's daughter, Katie, mentors the young girl but soon suspects that Alice's husband may not have killed himself ... and that Alice had secrets only her minister knew.
|

|
Senator's Wife
Miller, Sue
Two unconventional women, neighbors in adjacent New England townhouses--Meri Fowler, pregnant, newly married, and discovering the gap between reality and expectation, and Delia Naughton, wife of a notoriously unfaithful liberal senator--confront the costs and challenges of love.
Download Version
|

|
Sense of an Ending, The
Barnes, Julian
Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about--until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he'd left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he'd understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes's oeuvre.
|

|
Shadow Divers: the True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II
Kurson, Robert
Two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery surrounding the wreckage of a World War II German U-boat off the coast of New Jersey, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones.
|

|
Shadow of the Wind
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz
The international literary sensation--a runaway bestseller in Spain--is about a boy's quest through the secrets and shadows of postwar Barcelona for a mysterious author whose book has proved as dangerous to own as it is impossible to forget.
|

|
Sherlockian, The
Moore, Graham
When literary researcher Harold White is inducted into the preeminent Sherlock Holmes enthusiast society, he never imagines he's about to be thrust onto the hunt for Arthur Conan Doyle's missing diary. But after a Doylean scholar is murdered, it is Harold who takes up the search, both for the diary and for the killer.
|

|
Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the Value of Work
Crawford, Matthew
Crawford draws on his own experience - he quit a white collar job to become a motorcycle mechanic - to question the presumed value of the cubicle working world, deplore society's disconnection from the materials world, and vividly convey the reward of working with one's hands.
|

|
Silver Linings Playbook, The
Quick, Matthew
This brilliantly written debut novel is the riotous and poignant story of how one man regains his memory and comes to terms with the magnitude of his wife's betrayal.
|

|
Sing You Home
Picoult, Jodi
A stillborn baby ends Max and Zoe's marriage. Max leaves Zoe and turns to drinking. Zoe falls in love with a female school counselor, Vanessa. Max finds help for his drinking problem through his brother's church. Vanessa and Zoe get married. Vanessa offers to carry one of Zoe and Max's fertilized embryos. Zoe goes to Max to get permission to release the embryos to her but Max's new found religious fervor leads him to sue Zoe for custody.
|

|
Sisters Brothers, The
deWitt, Patrick
When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm's claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers.
|

|
Sisters, The
Jensen, Nancy
Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister Mabel have no one but each other--with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and reverberate through three generations of women.
|

|
Snow Child, The
Ivey, Eowyn
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees...
|

|
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
See, Lisa
Two women in nineteenth-century China develop a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Download Version
|

|
Soldier's Wife, The
Trollope, Joanna
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN LOVE AND DUTY COLLIDE? DAN RILEY IS A MAJOR IN THE BRITISH ARMY. After a six-month tour of duty in Afghanistan, he is coming home to the wife and young daughters he adores. He's up for promotion and his ex-Army grandfather and father couldn't be prouder. The Rileys are united in support of Dan's passion for his career. But are they really? His wife, Alexa, has been offered a good teaching job she can't take because the Army may move the family at any time. Her daughter Isabel hates her boarding school--the only good educational option for Army families--and starts running away. And Dan spends all his time on the base, unable to break the strong bonds forged with his friends in battle. Soon everyone who knows the Rileys is trying to help them save their marriage, but it's up to Alexa to decide if she can sacrifice her needs and those of her family to support Dan's commitment to his work. With her trademark intelligence and grace, Joanna Trollope illuminates the complexities of modern life in this story of a family striving to balance duty and ambition.
|

|
Spin
McKenzie, Catherine
When Kate Sandford lands an interview at her favorite music magazine, it's the chance of a lifetime. So Kate goes out to celebrate--and shows up still drunk to the interview the next morning. It's no surprise that she doesn't get the job, but her performance has convinced the editors that she'd be perfect for an undercover assignment for their gossip rag. All Kate has to do is follow "It Girl" Amber Sheppard into rehab. If she can get the inside scoop--and complete the thirty-day program--they'll reconsider her for the position at The Line. Kate takes the assignment, but when real friendships start to develop, she has to decide if what she has to gain is worth the price she'll have to pay.
|

|
Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: a Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Fadiman, Ann
"Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
A tragic tale of cultural differences chronicles the fight over the proper care of an epilectic Hmong child between a California medical center and her tradition-minded Laotian refugee family. "
|

|
Started Early, Took My Dog
Atkinson, Kate
Tracy Waterhouse, a retired police detective leading a quiet life, makes a snap decision to relieve habitual offender Kelly Cross of a young child he's been dragging around town. Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge. Meanwhile, detective Jackson Brodie embarks on a different sort of rescue--that of an abused dog.
|

|
State of Wonder
Patchett, Ann
A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh journeys into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years--a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.
|

|
Stranger's Child, The
Hollinghurst, Alan
From the Man Booker Prize--winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations. In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate--a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance--to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne's autograph album will change their and their families' lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried--until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them. Rich with Hollinghurst's signature gifts--haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism-- The Stranger's Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.
|

|
Sudden Country
Fisher, Karen
"A vivid and revelatory novel based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, this novel follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption. Alive with incident and insight, presenting with rare scope and intimacy the complex relations among nineteenth-century traders, immigrants, and Native Americans, it is a heroic and unforgettable story of love and loss, sacrifice and understanding."
|

|
Suite Francaise
Nemirovsky, Irene
Published more than sixty years following the author's death at Auschwitz, a remarkable story of life under the Nazi occupation includes two parts--"A Storm in June," set amid the chaotic 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and "Dolce," set in a German-occupied provincial village rife with jealousy, resentment, resistance, and collaboration.
Download Version
|

|
Swamplandia!
Russell, Karen
...Against a backdrop of hauntingly fecund plant life animated by ancient lizards and lawless hungers, the author has written a novel about a family's struggle to stay afloat in a world that is inexorably sinking.
|

|
Sweetheart Season
Fowler, Karen Joy
In 1947, the bucolic mill town of Magrit, Minnesota, confronts the terrible problem that none of its young men want to return home, leaving the town's girls romantically bereft, until the old mill owner forms a ball team and puts them on the road.
|

|
Sweetness of Tears, The
Haji, Nafisa
Jo March--family member of an Evangelical Christian Dynasty and early questioner of her own faith--knows that there is something she is not being told about her own past. She intends to find out. Told from multiple generational and cultural viewpoints, The Sweetness of Tears skillfully interweaves the lives and stories of Jo's relatives, many of whom she never knew existed. She travels from California to Chicago, Pakistan to Iraq, chasing loose threads that she hopes will lead to the truth and understanding of her own beginnings that she so craves. As Jo begins to discover who she is, what she learns above all else is that nothing is ever as it seems, and those with the strongest faith, are those who once doubted it the most. "-- Provided by publisher.
|