Monsignor Quixote

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Laura van den Berg

After two acclaimed story collections, the author brings us her highly anticipated debut novel--a gripping, imaginative, darkly funny tale of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Joy has no one. She spends her days working the graveyard shift at a grocery store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune. When Joy's immunity gains her admittance to a hospital in rural Kansas, she sees a chance to escape her bleak existence. There she submits to peculiar treatments and follows seemingly arbitrary rules, forming cautious bonds with other patients--including her roommate, whom she turns to in the night for comfort, and twin boys who are digging a secret tunnel. As winter descends, the hospital's fragile order breaks down and Joy breaks free, embarking on a journey from Kansas to Florida, where she believes she can find her birth mother, the woman who abandoned her as a child. On the road in a devastated America, she encounters mysterious companions, cities turned strange, and one very eerie house. As Joy closes in on Florida, she must confront her own damaged memory and the secrets she has been keeping from herself. -- Provided by publisher.

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Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad, about a voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State, in the heart of Africa, by the story's narrator Charles Marlow. Marlow tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest English writers, and Heart of Darkness is considered his best. His readers are brought to face our psychological selves to answer, ‘Who is the true savage?’. Originally published in 1902, Heart of Darkness remains one of this century’s most enduring works of fiction. Written several years after Joseph Conrad’s grueling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity.

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Bernard Binlin Dadié

Writing in an informal, episodic style, this recounts a young African man's first journey to France, from the exhilarating moment when he obtains his ticket through a humorous and fascinating tour across the City of Light.

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K.M. Peyton

In this darker (and more adult) installment of the Flambards series, Christina finds truth in her Aunt's warning about marrying outside of her class. Neither Dick nor the wealthy neighbors desire to associate with one another, putting a strain on Christina's marriage, and leaving the two without any mutual friends. Tensions intensify when Mark returns to live at Flambards, while Dorothy remains in France. Both marriages are pushed to their limits, and tragedy and heartaches ensue as the four try to manage their tangled lives. In this final installment the author takes the characters in directions readers are unlikely to have anticipated. 4th book in the Flambards series. (Some readers prefer to consider the series a trilogy, and to skip this book which was added some years later, and after the television series was made.) *Note:* This volume covers themes that keep it from fitting into the children's or young adult genre, in which the earlier books are often viewed.