Unforgettable

"Angel Tungaraza has recently moved to Rwanda from her native Tanzania. With her husband Pius and the five orphaned children of their late son and daughter, she is hardly short of things to do. But she still finds time to pursue her hobby and her passion: her small but increasingly successful business, baking individually-designed cakes for the parties and celebrations of her neighbours and their friends. As her customers tell her their stories, she comes to realise how much each of them has to mourn as well as how much they have to celebrate. And, finally, she comes to accept how much that is true of her too. -Publisher description.

The life of a ten-year-old boy in rural Virginia expands when he becomes friends with a newcomer who subsequently meets an untimely death trying to reach their hideaway, Terabithia, during a storm.

Fifteen years after he is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to die for the murder of a nine-year-old girl, overworked pro-bono lawyer Teresa Peralta Paget, her husband, and her stepson, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, become convinced that Rennell Price did not receive a fair trial and race against time to stop his execution.

Left profoundly deaf following a bout with scarlet fever, Grania O'Neill grows up at the Ontario School for the Deaf, where she spends her entire time, protected from the hearing world outside and learning sign language and speech, but her life is changed forever when she falls in love with Jim Lloy.

A successful attorney about to be married and preparing for a run for Congress, David Wolfe's life is thrown into turmoil when he is reunited with Hana Arif, a Palestinian woman with whom he had a secret love affair in law school, a reunion marked by the assassination of the Israeli prime minister and by his efforts to defend Hana when she is accused of being the mastermind behind the crime.

Gogo Mama profiles the lives of twelve very different African women. They include a genocide survivor from Rwanda; a pygmy who lives in a grass hut at the base of a volcano in the Congo; Zanzibar's most famous living diva; a former child soldier from Liberia; a grandmother fighting AIDS in South Africa; a freed slave from Ghana, who as a child was given to a priest as a sacrifice for crimes committed by an ancestor; a famous Egyptian belly dancer turned movie star; and a pioneering midwife from Timbuktu. The women speak frankly about their astonishing lives, past and present, in some of the most hostile and exotic parts of the continent.

One of the most powerful novels about the experience of war, first published in 1985 Captured by Hirohito's soldiers at the fall of Hong Kong and transferred to a Japanese slave camp outside Hiroshima, Captain Joe Sandingham was present when the bomb was dropped.

Doug Parker is a widower at age twenty-nine, and in his quiet suburban town, that makes him something of a celebrity, the object of sympathy, curiosity, and, in some cases, unbridled desire. But Doug has other things on his mind. First there's his sixteen year-old stepson, Russ: a once-sweet kid who now is getting into increasingly serious trouble on a daily basis. Then there are Doug's sisters: his bossy twin, Clair, who's just left he husband and moved in with Doug, determined to rouse him from his Grieving stupor. And Debbie, who's engaged to Doug's ex-best friend and manically determined to pull off the perfect wedding at any cost. Soon Doug's entire nuclear family is in his face. And when he starts dipping his toes into the shark-infested waters of the second-time around dating scene, it isn't long before his new life is spinning hopelessly out of control, cutting a harrowing and often hilarious swath of sexual missteps and escalating chaos across the suburban landscape.

A man who learned to read when he was ninety-eight recalls the early hardships of his life, shares his memories of segregation, and discusses his philosophical observations.

Elizabeth O'Reilly, the wife of a career Marine Corps officer and mother of four children (with one on the way), finds herself at odds with just about everything in her life. Having seen her husband off to Vietnam, she's left to contend with her own desires and yearnings - trying to care for her children while longing to pick up the theater career she abandoned for the demands of motherhood. Liz finds solace in a friendship with Father Ezekiel Germaine, a war veteran and eccentric priest with an appreciation for irony, and in the wary camaraderie of Betty Simmons, another military housewife, whose cocktails help Liz take the edge off. While Liz struggles with the vicissitudes of life on the home front, her husband, Captain Michael O'Reilly, commands an infantry company in Vietnam. Mike has no illusions about the glamour and glory of war; he is a man who understands the meaning of fighting for his country and has made his peace with it for better and for worse.

Perry's IQ is only 76, but he's not stupid. His grandmother taught him everything he needs to know to survive. She taught him to write things down so he won't forget them. She taught him to play the lottery every week. And most important, she taught him who to trust. When Gram dies, Perry is left orphaned and bereft at the age of 32. Then he wins twelve million dollars with his weekly Washington State Lottery ticket, and he finds he has more family than he knows what to do with.

The Abulheja family are forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Ein Hod and sent to live in a refugee camp in Jenin. Through Amal, the bright granddaughter of the patriarch, we witness the stories of her brothers: one, a stolen boy who becomes an Israeli soldier; the other who in sacrificing everything for the Palestinian cause will become his enemy. Amal's own dramatic story threads its way through six decades of Palestinian-Israeli tension, eventually taking her into exile in Pensylvania in America. Amal's is a story of love and loss, of childhood, marriage and parenthood, and finally the need to share her history with her daughter, to preserve the greatest love she has.

Revolves around two central characters: Lennie and George. Lennie is a man with the strength of two, but with the mind of a child, whose whole world centres around George, who steers him through life and protects him.

When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by their new mother and hope that she will stay.

Paris, July 1942: Ten-year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. But before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family's apartment. She keeps the key, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel'd'Hiv's sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France's past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it. In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel' d'Hiv' to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

When Nat Swanson, a cowboy on the run, stumbles across the trapped survivors of an Indian Apache ambush, the last thing he imagines is that he will be trying to save the lives of three nuns and seven children. Sister St Agnes is convinced he has been sent by God.

Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls, dressed in men's overalls, emerge from another freight car. Though they show no signs of abuse, fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. While the NAACP and the Communist Party vie to save the boys' lives and make political hay, and a wily criminal lawyer renowned for defending underworld characters battles age-old prejudices, a young journalist fights to rescue the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past.

The author of the "Three Cups of Tea" offers the continuing story of this determined humanitarian's efforts to promote peace through education. Filled with rich, personal stories and insights into the Middle East, this book is an inspiration- -and a call to action.

A fictionalized account of the post-war life of Peter, who hid in the secret annex with Anne Frank and her family, follows his survival of the Holocaust, his relocation to America, and his memories upon the publication of Anne's diary.

The effects of war on Japan and the world are seen through the experience of one family that survived the bombing of Hiroshima.

The author remembers the poverty, hunger, jokes, and bullying she and her siblings endured as children, and she looks back at her parents: her flighty, self-indulgent mother, a Pollyanna unwilling to assume the responsibilities of parenting, and her father, troubled, brilliant Rex, whose ability to turn his family's downward-spiraling circumstances into adventures allowed his children to excuse his imperfections until they grew old enough to understand what he had done to them- -and to himself. His grand plans to build a home for the family never evolved: the hole for the foundation of the "The Glass Castle, as the dream house was called, became the family garbage dump, and, of course, a metaphor for Rex Walls' life.

Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.

In a time when the civil rights movement is in full force, three women, Minny, Aibileen, and Skeeter, start a movement that puts them all at risk. They show the town that, whether black or white, women can unite.

Relocating to a family farm in Connecticut after surviving the Columbine school shootings, Caelum and Maureen discover a cache of family memorabilia dating back five generations, which reveals to Caelum unexpected truths about painful past events.

In 1986, Afghanistan was torn apart by a war with the Soviet Union. This graphic novel photo-journal is a record of one reporter's arduous and dangerous journey through Afghanistan accompanying the Doctors Without Borders. Didier Lefèvre's photography, paired with the art of Emmanuel Guibert, tells the powerful story of a mission undertaken by men and women dedicated to mending the wounds of war.

Based on an award-winning play by the same name, an evocative novel set in apartheid South Africa chronicles the abiding relationship that exists between two families--one black and one white--and two children born into the same household, in a saga that spans four generations and different African cultures.

A sequence of stories about the Vietnam War, this book also has the unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme. It aims to summarize America's involvement in Vietnam, and her coming to terms with that experience in the years that followed.

Nyree and Cia O'Callohan live on a remote farm in the east of what was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, theirs is a seductive childhood laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Their world extends as far as the big fence, erected to keep out the 'Terrs' whom their father is off fighting. The two girls know little beyond that until the arrival from the outside world of 'the bastard' their orphaned cousin Ronin, who is to poison their idyll for ever.

Twenty years after her early 1960s military father is forced to choose between loyalties in the wake of a local murder, Madeleine begins to understand the case's implication and launches a search for the killer.

Sarah begins her diary in the summer of 1881, when her family sets out on the wagon trail from Arizona Territory to Texas. As they travel through a land of rattlesnakes and Indians, hastily dug graves and unbearable loneliness, Sarah turns out to be her family's greatest support.

"The death of Judd Foxman's father marks the first time that the entire Foxman family-including Judd's mother, brothers, and sister-have been together in years. Conspicuously absent: Judd's wife, Jen, whose fourteen-month affair with Judd's radio-shock-jock boss has recently become painfully public. Simultaneously mourning the death of his father and the demise of his marriage, Judd joins the rest of the Foxmans as they reluctantly submit to their patriarch's dying request: to spend the seven days following the funeral together. In the same house. Like a family. As the week quickly spins out of control, longstanding grudges resurface, secrets are revealed, and old passions reawakened. For Judd, it's a weeklong attempt to make sense of the mess his life has become while trying in vain not to get sucked into the regressive battles of his madly dysfunctional family. All of which would be hard enough without the bomb Jen dropped the day Judd's father died: She's pregnant. Publisher description.

"One day in 1993, high up in the world's most inhospitable mountains, Greg Mortenson wandered lost and alone. after a failed attempt to climb K2, the world's deadliest peak. When the people of an impoverished village in Pakistan's Karakoram Himalaya took him in and nursed him back to health, Mortenson made an impulsive promise: He would return one day and build them a school. Three Cups of Tea traces Mortenson's decade-long odyssey to build schools, especially for girls, throughout the region that gave birth to the Taliban and sanctuary to Al Qaeda. While he wages war with the root causes of terrorism poverty and ignorance by providing both girls and boys with a balanced, nonextremist education. Mortenson must survive a kidnapping, fatwas issued by enraged mullahs, death threats from Americans who consider him a traitor, and wrenching separations from his family. -Container.

"A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel, a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice, but the weight of history will only tolerate so much. Publisher description.

"Georgie Sinclair's husband has walked out; her sixteen-year-old son is busy surfing born-again websites; and all those overdue articles for Adhesives in the Modern World are getting her down. So when Georgie meets Mrs Shapiro an eccentric old Jewish émigré neighbour a firm friendship is formed over the reduced-price shelf at the supermarket. When Mrs Shapiro is admitted to hospital, to Georgie's surprise, she is named as her next of kin. But sorting out Mrs Shapiro's semi-derelict mansion, home also to seven stinky cats, is no easy job. -Publisher description.

This is the story of a young woman's struggle to save her family and her soul during the most extraordinary year of 1666, when plague suddenly visited a small Derbyshire village and the villagers, inspired by a charismatic preacher, elected to quarantine themselves to limit the contagion.