Oprah's Book Club®

In upstate New York, the Mulvaneys are a wealthy and magnetic family--attractive, charismatic, promising. But after 25 years, the family begins to slide, then fragment, then shatter, and soon there is nothing left of the dynasty. Judd, the youngest of the clan, begins to search for the reasons behind the downfall, and as he uncovers family secrets, he begins to bring the Mulvaneys slowly back together in a spirit of healing and compassion.

The year is 1919, and--for reasons that eventually become clear--Amanda Starkey leaves the big city to go home and live with her sister Mattie, whose husband has been wounded in World War I and has not yet returned. Mattie drowns in the pond just before Carl, her husband, returns, leaving their little girl, Ruth, whose upbringing is eventually shared between Amanda and Carl. The truth about Mattie`s drowning eventually emerges, along with other buried secrets, as Carl and Amanda struggle to forge some kind of family and future for Ruth.

Samantha Morrow's husband divorces her, and Samantha must take in lodgers to pay the mortgage on her elaborate house. Her experiences enable her to find out who she really is, to become more independent, and even--surprisingly--to reject a chance to reclaim her old life

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Having moved on with her life after a friend was brutally murdered, Jo Becker is now married with a grown family, but when an old housemate moves into the neighborhood, Jo rekindles a relationship that takes her back to the past and threatens her future.

This is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Harley Altmyer's mother is in prison for killing his father. So Harley is bringing up his younger sisters and working two jobs to pay the bills-and that doesn't leave a lot of time for distractions. But lately, he's getting distracted by Callie Mercer, an older woman who fills him with such desire he fears he might explode. And as he struggles to keep it together while things begin to spin out of control, Harley finds that as shattered as his family is, there are still more shattering surprises in store...

Julie Harmon works hard, "hard as a man" they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her. She is just a teenager when her brother dies in her arms. The following year, she marries Hank and moves to Gap Creek. Julie and Hank discover that the modern world is complex, grinding ever on without pause or concern for their hard work. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay.

A spectacularly taut drama about a rural American family, by the author of The Book of Ruth. Set in the small Midwestern town of Prairie Center, here is an achingly accurate rendering of how one event--the drowning of a child--can change forever the lives of everyone involved.

A remarkable new writer makes her debut - with a novel of tragedy and triumph in the life of an African American family in Georgetown, circa 1925. Twelve-year-old Johnnie Mae must come to terms with the powerful and confused emotions sparked by her sister's death as she struggles to decide and discover the kind of woman she will become.

In a small Mississippi town during the late 1950s, Even Grade, a 28 year-old black man who grew up as an orphan, and Valuable Korner, the teenage white daughter of the local prostitute, search for love, family, and commitment as their lives intersect with that of Joody Two Sun, a seer who becomes Even's lover.

With one late-night knock on her door, Kathryn Lyons's worst fears as a pilot's wife come true: Her husband, Jack, has died in a mid-air explosion off the coast of Ireland. Later, a phone number found among Jack's papers leads Kathryn to London and the unfathomable truth about her husband's secret other life. A second wife and two young children are just the beginning of what Jack was hiding in England. With each staggering revelation, Kathryn must reconcile her memories of the man she loved with the disturbing portrait unfolding before her.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover--then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.

A feisty young woman who is seven months pregnant when she leaves her Tennessee trailer park with her boyfriend, she is abandoned outside a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma. Living on canned goods and sleeping behind the water heater, Novalee carries her pregnancy to term, and her child becomes known as the Wal-Mart baby. Novalee eventually gets a job at the Wal-Mart, and makes a life for herself and her child.

Sybil Danforth, an uncertified lay midwife in rural Vermont, gets into trouble when she performs an emergency Caesarian on a minister's wife. Sybil's daughter, Connie, looks back to 1981 to tell the story of the murder trial.

At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her.

An abused wife named Frannie leaves home with her young son, and lives under a new identity in Florida, where she tries to make a comfortable life for the two of them. She is always in fear that her husband will find her, however, and ultimately he does, but Frannie is resilient, and survives to go on to a new life.

Toni Morrison writes about a group of African Americans who found a community in Oklahoma called Ruby. When the outside world threatens the peace of the community, five women whose lives are particularly troubled take refuge in an abandoned convent, which alienates the men of the town. In this novel, which pits men against women and presents women as victims, the result is violence--but not despair. In the end, Morrison remains hopeful.

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!

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.