LOST by ALICE LICHTENSTEIN

On a cold January morning, Susan a professor of Biology, leaves her husband alone for a few minutes and returns to find him gone. Suffering from dementia, no longer able to take care of himself, Christopher has wandered into a frigid landscape with no sense of direction, LOST!

Susan's life intersects with those of two strangers, Jeff, her liaison with the police, a social worker and search-and-rescue expert and Corey, a twelve year old boy rendered mute by a family tragedy who has become one of Jeff's cases.

From the unexpected convergence of three lives, Corey, Jeff and Susan, emerges an arresting portrait of the shifting terrain or marriage, and the uneasy burden of love and regret.

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

It is January 1946. London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man that she had never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb.

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world

of this man and his friends. It is a wonderfully eccentric world. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, born as a spur of the moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island, boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers, all.

Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society's members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.

The book is written with warmth and humor as a series of letters.

HOMER AND LANGLEY BY E.L. DOCTOROW

Homer and Langley are brothers, the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness or perhaps greatness by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think that they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers, as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet, the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers, wars, political movements, technological advances, and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians......and their housebound lives are fraught with peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

The book is brilliantly conceived, and gorgeously written, this is a wonderful rendering of the lives of the Collyer brothers.

Eat, Pray and Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything that a modern American woman is supposed to want, husband, country home, successful career, but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. The book tells the story of how she left behind all those outward signs of success and what she found in its place. Following a divorce and a crushing depression , Gilbert set out to examine three different parts of her nature, set against the backdrop of three different cultures, pleasure in Italy, devotion in India and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee

IN 1942, Will Truesdale an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong falls passionately in love with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But, their affair is threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their lives.

Ten year later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. Seduced by the colony's heady social life, she soon begins an affair, only to discover that her lover is hiding a devastating past. As the threads of this spellbound novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge between love and safety, courage and survival, the present and above all, the past.

MUDBOUND by Hillary Jordan

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place that is both foreign and frightening. As the McAllan's are tested in every way two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to help work on the farm. Ronsel Jackson is the eldest son of a black sharecropper who live on the McAllan farm. Jamie is everything that his older brother Henry is not.

Mudbound reveals how everyone becomes a player in a tragedy on the grandest scale as they strive for love and honor.

Pope Joan by Donna Woolfolk Cross

Brilliant and talented, Joan rebels against the medieval social structures that forbid women to learn. When her brother is brutally killed, during a Viking attack, Joan takes up his cloak and his identity and enters the monastery of Fulda. As brother John, Joan distinguishes herself as a great scholar and healer. Eventually, she is drawn to Rome, where she become enmeshed in a dangerous web of love, passion and politics. She finally attains the highest office in Christendom wielding a power greater than any woman before or since. But, such power always comes at a price.

The Dark Ages come to life in all their brutal splendor. It is the story of a woman whose strength of vision led her to defy the social restrictions of the day.