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1996- 1997 | Book | Description | Author | | | Oprah's Book Club | | | 1996 | 
The Book of Ruth | The Book of Ruth A standout in the crowd of first novels, Ruth narrates a story that confronts real-life issues of alienation and violence from which Hamilton creates a stunning testament to the human capacity for mercy, compassion, and love. Winner of the 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award. | Jane Hamilton | | 1996 | 
Song of Solomon | Song of Solomon Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. | Toni Morrison | | 1996 |  The Deep End of the Ocean | The Deep End of the Ocean Few first novels receive the kind of attention and acclaim showered on this powerful story -- a nationwide bestseller, a critical success, and the first title chosen for Oprah's Book Club. Both highly suspenseful and deeply moving, The Deep End of the Ocean imagines every mother's worst nightmare -- the disappearance of a child --a s it explores a family's struggle to endure, even against extraordinary odds. Filled with compassion, humor, and brilliant observations about the texture of real life, here is a story of rare power, one that will touch readers' hearts and make them celebrate the emotions that make us all one. | Jacquelyn Mitchard | | 1997 | 
The Best Way to Play | The Best Way to Play (Little Bill Books for Beginning Readers) Little Bill and his friends LOVE the TV show Space Explorers. And so when the new Space Explorers video game comes out, they each want a copy. But when Little Bill asks his parents to buy him the game, they say no. So Little Bill and his friends go to their friend Andrew's house to play the game. What they discover, though, is that the video game isn't nearly as much fun nor as challenging as what their imaginations can dream up! | Bill Cosby | | 1997 | Out-of- Print | Treasure Hunt | Bill Cosby | | 1997 | 
The Meanest Thing to Say | The Meanest Thing to Say (Little Bill Books for Beginning Readers) When a new boy in his second grade class tries to get the other students to play a game that involves saying the meanest things possible to one another, Little Bill shows him a better way to make friends. | Bill Cosby | | 1997 | 
A Virtuous Woman | A Virtuous Woman When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.
Kaye Gibbons's first novel, Ellen Foster, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the praise of writers from Walker Percy to Eudora Welty. In A Virtuous Woman, Gibbons transcends her early promise, creating a multilayered and indelibly convincing portrait of two seemingly ill-matched people who somehow miraculously make a marriage. | Kaye Gibbons | | 1997 |  Ellen Foster | Ellen Foster "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy". So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heart/wrenching novel... [Ellen Foster] is as much a part of the backwoods South as a Faulkner character and a good deal more endearing". | Kaye Gibbons | | 1997 | 
A Lesson Before Dying | A Lesson Before Dying From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. | Ernest J. Gaines | | 1997 |  Songs in Ordinary Time | Songs in Ordinary Time A powerful and gripping novel from the acclaimed author of Vanished and A Dangerous Woman. "A nearly perfect summer book. . . . Songs in Ordinary Time is real life cruising small-town USA with the top down and the volume up. In her graphic, stiletto chapters, Mary McGarry Morris is a cross between Elizabeth Gaskell and David Lynch".--Minneapolis Star Tribune. NPR sponsorship. | Mary McGarry Morris | | 1997 | 
The Heart of a Woman | The Heart of a Woman This engaging book chronicles the changes in Maya Angelou's life as she enters the hub of activity that is New York. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, she rededicates herself to writing, and finds love at an unexpected moment. Reflecting on her many roles--from northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest to mother of a rebellious teenage son--Angelou eloquently speaks to an awareness of the heart within us all.
| Maya Angelou | | 1997 | 
The Raptpure of Canaan | The Rapture of Canaan At the Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind, Grandpa Herman makes the rules for everyone, and everyone obeys, or else. Try as she might, Ninah hasn't succeeded in resisting temptation -- her prayer partner, James -- and finds herself pregnant. She fears the wrath of Grandpa Herman, the congregation and of God Himself. But the events that follow show Ninah that God's ways are more mysterious than even Grandpa Herman understands . . .
| Sheri Reynolds | | 1997 | 
Stones from the River | Stones from the River Stones from the River is a daring, dramatic and complex novel of life in Germany. It is set in Burgdorf, a small fictional German town, between 1915 and 1951. The protagonist is Trudi Montag, a Zwerg -- the German word for dwarf woman. As a dwarf she is set apart, the outsider whose physical "otherness" has a corollary in her refusal to be a part of Burgdorf's silent complicity during and after World War II. Trudi establishes her status and power, not through beauty, marriage, or motherhood, but rather as the town's librarian and relentless collector of stories. Through Trudi's unblinking eyes, we witness the growing impact of Nazism on the ordinary townsfolk of Burgdorf as they are thrust on to a larger moral stage and forced to make choices that will forever mark their lives. Stones from the River is a story of secrets, parceled out masterfully by Trudi -- and by Ursula Hegi -- as they reveal the truth about living through unspeakable times. | Ursula Hegi | | 1997 |  She's Come Undone | She's Come Undone In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi that her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she "really" goes under. | Wally Lamb |
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