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The Gangster We Are All Looking For

The Gangster We Are All Looking For
  • Author(s): Lê Thi Diem Thúy (Le Thi Diem Thuy)
  • Location(s): San Diego
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1970s

In 1978, six Vietnamese refugees were pulled from the sea just off California. In San Diego, a little girl’s matter-of-fact innocence masks the ghostly traumas that still haunt her: the cataclysm that engulfed her homeland: the memory of a...

The Ghosts of Havana

The Ghosts of Havana
  • Author(s): Mike Dennis
  • Location(s): Florida Keys
  • Genre(s): Mystery, Thriller
  • Era(s): Modern, 20th century

Nightclub singer Olivia si found murdered, and her sister and the club owner find themselves up to their necks in this tale of revenge. Olivia’s grandfather died in a similar manner decades earlier. Coincidence?

The Girl in Times Square

The Girl in Times Square
  • Author(s): Paullina Simons
  • Location(s): New York City (NYC)
  • Genre(s): Mystery
  • Era(s): Modern

A stunning and powerful contemporary love story from one of the best storytellers this century. What if everything you believed about your life was a lie? Meet Lily Quinn. She is broke, struggling to finish college, pay her rent,...

The Girl Next Door

The Girl Next Door
  • Author(s): Amy Jo Cousins
  • Location(s): Chicago
  • Genre(s): Romance
  • Era(s): Modern

Charles “Cash” Carmichael traded his high-rise condo and family-firm career for a job coaching soccer for Chicago’s inner-city kids. He’s adjusting to living on minimum wage when his young cousin, newly out and running away from home, shows up...

The Girls Who Grew Big

The Girls Who Grew Big
  • Author(s): Leila Mottley
  • Location(s): Florida Panhandle
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): Contemporary

When Adela Woods tells her parents she’s pregnant, they immediately send her a thousand miles away to stay with her grandmother in Padua Beach. The intention is that she will leave her baby in ‘the forgotten Panhandle of Florida’....

The God of War

The God of War
  • Author(s): Marisa Silver
  • Location(s): The Salton Sea
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1970s

The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, an unintentionally man-made body of water in the middle of the...

The Godfather

The Godfather
  • Author(s): Mario Puzo
  • Location(s): New York City (NYC)
  • Genre(s): Crime
  • Era(s): Post WW2

The story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of a New York Mafia family, inspired some of the most successful movies ever. It is in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather that Corleone first appears. As Corleone’s desperate struggle to control...

The Golden Gate

The Golden Gate
  • Author(s): Vikram Seth
  • Location(s): San Francisco
  • Genre(s): Fiction
  • Era(s): 1980s

The Golden Gate is a brilliantly achieved novel written in verse. Set in the 1980s in the affluence and sunshine of California’s Silicon Valley, it is an exuberant and witty story of twenty-somethings looking for love, pleasure and the...

The Good Lord Bird

The Good Lord Bird
  • Author(s): James McBride
  • Location(s): Boston, Kansas
  • Era(s): 1850s

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857: the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry...

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby
  • Author(s): F Scott Fitzgerald
  • Location(s): Long Island
  • Genre(s): Fiction, Historical
  • Era(s): 1920s

1920s, Long Island. In part a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby’s quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an...

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