A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall masters from Balzac to Dickens, this magnificant novel caputures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea.  The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the cast violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.

As the cahracters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love.  A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

Rohinton

Mistry 

Cane River

Cane River

Lalita Tademy was a corporate vice president at a Fortune "RM" 500 company when she decided to give notice and embark upon an odyssey to uncover her family's past.  Through her exhaustive research, she would find herself transported back to the early 1800s, to an isolated, close-knit rural community on Louisiana's Cane River. Here, Tademy takes historical fact and mingles it with fiction to weave a vivid account of what life was like for the four remarkable women who came before her.  The result is a family saga that sweeps from the early days of slavery into a pre-Civil Rights South -- a unique and moving slice of America's past that will resonate with readers for generations to come. 

Lalita

Tademy 

Icy Sparks 

Icy Sparks

In the tradition of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Cape Ann, a funny, sad, wise, and redeeming first novel about a young girl's battle with a troubling affliction.  Rural Kentucky in the 1950s is not an easy place to grow up in, and it's especially hard for 10-year-old Icy Sparks, an orphan who lives with her grandparents.  Life becomes even more difficult for Icy when the violent tics and uncontrollable cursing begin.  Icy's adolescence is marred by the humiliation brought on by her mysterious condition, and its all-too-visible symptoms are the source of endless hilarity as everyone around her offers an opinion about what's troubling the girl.  Eventually, Icy finds solace in the company of an obese woman who knows what it's like to be an outcast in this tightly knit Appalachian community. Narrated by a now-grown Icy, this first novel shimmers with warmth and humor as it recounts a young girl's painful and poignant journey to womanhood--and the many lives she touches and enriches along the way. 

Gwyn

Hyman

Rubio 

Sula 

Sula

Two girls who grow up to become women.  Two friends who become something worse than enemies.  In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio.  Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret.  It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah.  But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal--or does it end?  Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life. 

Toni

Morrison