Tom Stechschulte
1) The road
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English
Description
In this postapocalyptic novel, a father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they...
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Series
Newbery Medal winner volume 1978
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English
Description
All summer, Jess pushed himself to be the fastest boy in the fifth grade, and when the year's first school-yard race was run, he was going to win. But his victory was stolen by a newcomer, by a girl, one who didn't even know enough to stay on the girls' side of the playground. Then, unexpectedly, Jess finds himself sticking up for Leslie, for the girl who breaks rules and wins races. The friendship between the two grows as Jess guides the city girl...
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I had no idea that Frieda would enter my life and alter it in the most profound way, but that' s one of the beautiful things about animals. They change you, and you almost never see it coming." In 2007, a few years after purchasing Bedlam Farm in upstate New York, Jon Katz met Maria Wulf, a quiet, sensitive artist hoping to rekindle her creative spark. Jon, like her, was introspective yet restless, a writer struggling to find his purpose. He felt...
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A crime of unfathomable horror has a ripple-like effect on four profoundly different souls. Helen, a troubled inmate at Sloatsburg women's prison, is serving a life sentence for the murder of her children. Dr. Louise Forrest, the recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old boy, has forsworn the Park Avenue practice for which she trained in favor of the chief of psychiatry job at Sloatsburg. Former New York City narcotics detective Ike Bradshaw is...
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"He's a gambler at best. A con artist at worst," her aunt had said of the handlebar-mustached man who snatched Ella Wallace away from her dreams of studying art in France. Eighteen years later, that man has disappeared, leaving Ella alone and struggling to support her three sons. While the world is embroiled in World War I, Ella fights her own personal battle to keep the mystical Florida land that has been in her family for generations from the
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Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You is rich with the music of the Southern mountains and the stories of their people. In this novel from acclaimed author Fred Chappell, Jess Kirkman's grandmother is dying, and Jess remembers the tales she and his mother have passed down to him--a chorus of women's voices that sing and share and celebrate the common song of life.
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"In a North Carolina mountain town filled with moonshine and rotten husbands, Sadie Blue is only the latest girl to face a dead-end future at the mercy of a dangerous drunk. She's been married to Roy Tupkin for fifteen days, and she knows now that she should have listened to the folks who said he was trouble. But when a stranger sweeps in and knocks the world off-kilter for everyone in town, Sadie begins to think there might be more to life than being...
13) Plainsong
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English
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Kent Haruf has received prestigious awards, including a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation for his finely-tuned works. Before the opening chapter of this novel, Haruf offers a definition. Plainsong is "any simple and unadorned melody or air." Direct yet elegant, Haruf's Plainsong is a hymn to the breadth of the human spirit. A high school history teacher in a small Colorado town, Guthrie is raising his two young sons alone. Thoughtful...
15) Cimarron rose
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Lucas Smothers, nineteen and from the wrong side of town is arrested and charged with the rape and murder of a young girl. His lawyer, Billy Bob Holland, is convinced of Lucas's innocence, but proving it -in a small Texas town riven by prejudice and corruption-is going to be even more difficult than Billy Bob suspected.
16) Child of God
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English
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From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road In this taut, chilling story, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. "Like the novelists he admires—Melville,...
17) Shutter Island
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English
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U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, come to Shutter Island's Ashcliffe Hospital in search of an escaped mental patient, but uncover true wickedness as Ashcliffe's mysterious patient treatments propel them to the brink of insanity.
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When Miranda Lovelady and Dr. Bill Brockton discover what could be the bones of Jesus of Nazareth, their finding triggers a deadly tug-of-war between the anthropologists, the Vatican, and a deadly zealot who hopes to use the bones to bring about the Second Coming--and trigger the end of time.
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World-renowned forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass and acclaimed journalist Jon Jefferson have combined their talents on several New York Times best-sellers. A thrilling tale of suspense, Bones of Betrayal shows why Kathy Reichs praises Bass and Jefferson's "terrific forensic detail" and calls them "the real deal." "Southern-fried forensics. Nothing too fancy, but it does taste good going down."-Kirkus Reviews
20) The dying animal
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English
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Philip Roth, one of the best-known and award winning literary masters of our time, engages his readership with insightful and challenging novels of the human condition. With The Dying Animal, he revisits the character David Kepesh. At age 60, Kapesh is drawn out of his carefully ordered existence and into an obsessive affair with one of his students.