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Reading recommendations for fiction, nonfiction, and audiobooks across all reading levels.
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First published in 1852, "The Blithedale Romance" is the third of Nathaniel Hawthorne's romantic novels. Set in the utopian communal farm called Blithedale in the 1840's, the novel tells the story of four inhabitants of the commune: Hollingsworth, a misogynist philanthropist obsessed with turning Blithedale into a colony for the reformation of criminals; Zenobia, a passionate feminist; Priscilla, a mysterious lady with a hidden agenda who turns out...
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"Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. But Ursa's powers come with a cost."-- Provided by publisher.
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"When Isabelle Poole meets Dr. Preston Grind, she's fresh out of high school, pregnant with her art teacher's baby, and totally on her own. Izzy knows she can be a good mother but without any money or relatives to help, she's left searching. Dr. Grind, an awkwardly charming child psychologist, has spent his life studying family, even after tragedy struck his own. Now, with the help of an eccentric billionaire, he has the chance to create a "perfect...
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"A fifty-year-old cold case involving California royalty comes back to life-with potentially fatal consequences-in this gripping standalone novel from the New York Times bestselling author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. The Gardener Estate is one of the most storied and beloved places on the West Coast: a magnificent house in vast formal grounds, home to a family that shaped California-and fought hard to conceal the turmoil and eccentricities...
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When a young woman leaves her family, and the civilized world, to join an off-the-grid community headed by an enigmatic leader, she discovers that belonging comes with a deadly cost, in this lush and searing debut novel. At nineteen, Berie encounters a seductive and mysterious man at a bus station near her home in North Carolina. Shut off from the people around her, she finds herself compelled by his promise of a new life. He ferries her into a place...
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""It's time to come Home. All five of you. Or else." Saskia was a damaged, lonely teenager when she arrived at the lakeside commune called Home. She was entranced by the tang of sourdough starter; the midnight call of the loons; the triumph of foraging wild mushrooms from the forest floor. But most of all she was taken with Abraham, Home's charismatic leader, the North Star to Saskia and the four other teens who lived there, her best and only friends....
7) Arcadia
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The lyrical and haunting story of a great American dream--the progress of a utopian community and its lasting impact on a gifted young man.
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Razorbill
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
Three teen girls get caught up in a real estate battle between a commune and an exploitative megachurch in their small Montana town, and they devise a plot to exact revenge and make a profit by kidnapping the pastor's son and demanding ransom money.
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"Seven Children. Five Mothers. One idyllic commune. What could go wrong? Annabel Cooper wants to save the world. Her story begins in 1964 with her journey to Freedom Summer in Mississippi, where the disappearance of her first love ignites a lifelong fight for justice. Years later, she, her husband, and four other couples form a Boston political collective where they live together with their children in a rambling Boston house. As the era's social...
10) The lingering
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Jack and Ali are looking for a fresh start and a new home at Rosalind House, a self-sufficient commune established in a former psychiatric hospital. But the couple are clearly not all they seem, and their arrival sparks a chain of unexpected and unexplained incidents. As the disturbing history of Rosalind House and the nearby village come to light, events from the past return to haunt the residents, and someone is seeking retribution.
11) Lady sunshine
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"For Jackie Pierce, everything changed the summer of 1979, when she spent three months of infinite freedom at her bohemian uncle's sprawling estate on the California coast. As musicians, artists, and free spirits gathered at The Sandcastle for the season in pursuit of inspiration and communal living, Jackie and her cousin Willa fell into a fast friendship, testing their limits along the rocky beach and in the wild woods ... until the summer abruptly...
12) Eggshell days
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Emmy, Niall, and Sita and Jonathan miss their train back to London from a Somerset wedding, escaping Britain's worst rail crash in sixty years. Upon reflection of their mortality, the friends reevaluate their lives, and come to a decision. They will all, along with Emmy's daughter Lila, Niall's girlfriend Kat, and Sita and Jonathan's children Jay and Asha, move into the ramshackle manor house Emmy recently inherited in Cornwall. In the idyllic setting,...
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"Creation Lake is a novel about a freelance agent, a 34-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and bold opinions and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. We never learn her real name. Sadie has met her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"-- making...
15) Wolfpack
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Little, Brown and Company
Pub. Date
2023.
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A group of teenage girls living in a cult are ensnared by suspicision and paranoia when one of them goes missing.
16) Hummingbird Lane
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"Ever since childhood, Emma and Sophie were bound by a passion for painting. Like all young best friends, they promised to never lose touch. But the girls came from different worlds, and their paths diverged when Emma went to an elite college and Sophie worked her way through state school. After a decade they've reconnected, both in a time of need. Emma has been struggling with depression since her college years, and she's lost herself under the suffocating...
18) Paradise
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As the novel begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby assault the nearby Convent and the women in it.
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"Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Hired by families as a last resort, he requires only a single object to find the person who has vanished. When he takes on the case of Maggie St. James--a well-known author of dark, macabre children's books--he's led to a place many believed to be only a legend. Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life....