· My Cousin Rachel is a novel by British author Daphne du Maurier, published in 1951. Like the earlier Rebecca, it is a mystery-romance, largely set on a large estate in Cornwall.

  · After three years of marriage, Rose Clinton finds herself pregnant. Unsatisfied with her life, and questioning her love for her husband, she runs away leaving just a short note of apology to her unsuspecting husband and mother. She ends up in Habit, Kentucky at St. Elizabeth’s Home for Unwed Mothers. Of course Rose isn’t “unwed”, but the book is about lies and liars. Most of the residents at St. Elizabeth are liars. They are hiding their pregnancies, so that they can give up their children for adoption and then slip back into their lives. The novel is told in three segments; the first narrated by Rose, the second by Son, and the third by Cecelia.

  · In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

  · Harrison Shepherd is the son of an American father and a Mexican mother, who grows up in Mexico as a housekeeper in the famous artist household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. His exposure to the politics of Leon Trotsky turns him into a committed leftist--views that come back to haunt him when he moves back to the United States in the aftermath of World War II and must face the paranoia and witch-hunting of the McCarthy era. Kingsolver has crafted a rich and layered story, full of powerful political sentiment, that vividly evokes the tension and hopes of the Americas. Selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2009.

  · He is a brilliant math professor, with a peculiar problem--since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only 80 minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a 10-year-old son who is hired to care for the professor. Between them, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms.

  · A story of racism, violence, and self-realization set in backwoods Louisiana under the Jim Crow era. The action is set in motion when a white farmer is murdered by a black, in circumstances reminiscent of the notorious Emmet Till case of the 1950s. Rather than allow the defendant to be summarily executed--or lynched--fifteen elderly black men go to the local sheriff and each confess to the crime, thereby making prosecution of the case virtually impossible.

  · The authors of the greatest American novel and of our greatest military memoirs did much to inspire each other to create their masterpieces. Suffering from terminal cancer, ‘Sam’ Grant worked against a deadline of death to complete his memoirs while Sam Clemens stood at his side as editor and publisher even as Huckleberry Finn was entering the world.

  · The letters comprising this small charming novel begin in 1946, when single, 30-something author Juliet Ashton (nom de plume Izzy Bickerstaff) writes to her publisher to say she is tired of covering the sunny side of war and its aftermath. When Guernsey farmer Dawsey Adams finds Juliet's name in a used book and invites articulate—and not-so-articulate—neighbors to write Juliet with their stories, the book's epistolary circle widens, putting Juliet back in the path of war stories. The occasionally contrived letters jump from incident to incident—including the formation of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society while Guernsey was under German occupation.

  · Intrepid international explorer, biologist, and photographer Mark W. Moffett, "the Indiana Jones of entomology," takes us around the globe on a strange and colorful journey in search of the hidden world of ants. With tales from Nigeria, Indonesia, the Amazon, Australia, California, and elsewhere, Moffett recounts his entomological exploits and provides fascinating details on how ants live and how they dominate their ecosystems through strikingly human behaviors, yet at a different scale and at a faster tempo. Moffett's spectacular close-up photographs shrink us down to size, so that we can observe ants in familiar roles: working as farmers, warriors, builders, big-game hunters, and slave owners. We find them in marketplaces and on assembly lines. We discover them dealing with issues we think of as uniquely human-from hygiene and recycling to warfare and terrorism. Adventures among Ants introduces some of the world's most awe-inspiring species, and at the same time, offers a startling new perspective on the limits of our own perceptions.

  · The naturalist author of Refuge and An Unspoken Hunger reflects on what it means to be human, the interconnection between the natural and human worlds, and how they combine to produce both tumult and peace, ugliness and beauty.

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