Jane Smiley
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
The time is 1979. Larry Cook, a proud and exacting farmer, whose family has lived on this land for four generations, unexpectedly decides to retire and turn over his valuable holdings to his three daughters. For Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm with their husbands, the gift makes sense - a reward for years of hard work, a challenge to make the farm even more successful. But the youngest, Caroline, a Des Moines lawyer, flatly rejects the idea,...
2) Some luck
Author
Series
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
"An epic novel that spans thirty years in the lives of a farm family in Iowa, telling a parallel story of the changes taking place in America from 1920 through the early 1950s"--Provided by publisher.
3) Private life
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
As her husband's obsessions with science take a darker turn on the eve of World War II, Margaret Mayfield is forced to consider the life she has so carefully constructed.
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
"From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls. Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have:...
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. The narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, encompassing Cold War blinkeredness, Sixties rebellion, and escalating wealth into the Eighties.
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
On the morning after the 2003 Academy Awards, Max--an Oscar-winning writer/director whose fame has waned--and his lover, Elena, are in bed, still groggy from last night's red-carpet festivities. They are talking about movies, talking about love, talking about the just-begun war in Iraq. But a house full of guests demands attention. They share their stories of Hollywood past and present; they watch films in Max's luxe screening room; they gossip by...
7) Horse heaven
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
A novel set in the world of thoroughbred racing follows a group of trainers, jockeys, and "track brats" on a two-year journey through the racing cycle.
"It's not true," says a character in Jane Smiley's funny, passionate, and brilliant new novel of horse racing, "that anything can happen at the racetrack," but many astonishing and affecting things do -- and in Horse Heaven, we find them woven into a marvelous tapestry of joy and love, chicanery,...
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres and the New York Times best-selling Last Hundred Years Trilogy, a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals--and a young boy--whose lives intersect in Paris Paras is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. At dusk, one afternoon she pushes open the door of her stall--she's a curious filly--and, after traveling through the night, arrives by chance...
9) Golden age
Author
Series
Last hundred years volume 3
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
2015.
Language
English
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...
10) Moo
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
A satire on university life, describing the rackets and the intellectual dishonesty that goes on. The setting is the U of Moo where research into the destruction of rain forests is tailored to suit the corporation funding the project. By the author of A Thousand Acres.
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
1998
Language
English
Description
A novel on 1855 Bloody Kansas, an armed clash between slaveholders and abolitionists, often referred to as a prologue to the Civil War. The heroine is Lidie Newton, the wife of a slain abolitionist. Dressed as a boy, she embarks on a mission of revenge against his killer. By the author of Moo.
13) The Greenlanders
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
The Greenlanders is the compelling story of one family--proud landowner Asgeir Gunnarsson; his daughter Margret, whose willful independence leads her into passionate adultery and exile; and his son Gunnar, whose quest for knowledge is at the compelling center of this unforgettable book.
Author
Publisher
Not Supplied
Pub. Date
Not Supplied
Language
English
Description
"Jules Verne's pioneering classic tells the story of the distinguished but eccentric Professor Lidenbrock, who finds a scrap of parchment in an old manuscript. A cipher, written in runes, tells of an entrance to another world - a world hidden beneath our own. So with his nephew reluctantly in tow, the Professor follows this cryptic clue down into a dormant volcano, and the further they descend, the more extraordinary the discoveries and creatures...
16) Twenty yawns
Author
Publisher
Two Lions
Pub. Date
[2016]
Language
English
Description
Going to bed early after spending a busy day at the beach with her family, Lucy wakes up in the middle of the night to find that her imagination leads her to see things differently in the dark.
17) True Blue
Author
Series
Horses of Oak Valley Ranch volume 3
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2011.
Language
English
Description
In 1960s California, eighth-grader Abby Lovitt has trouble with True Blue, the newest horse on her family's ranch, a beautiful dappled gray who is so often spooked, Abby wonders if he is haunted by the ghost of his deceased former owner.
Author
Publisher
Doubleday
Pub. Date
c2010
Language
English
Description
One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois-Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that the binary number system and electronic switches, combined with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would make his life easier. Then he went back and...
20) A good horse
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Description
On her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, eighth-grader Abby Lovitt tries to rely on her Christian faith as she faces the possibility of giving up her beloved colt, Jack.