Ocean State Libraries

"From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home ... On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is up rooted...

"A sad-funny-touching story that looks at the frustrations and perils of life in suburbia through darkly-tinted, not rose-colored, glasses." —The New York Times
The Abstinence Teacher illuminates the powerful emotions that run beneath the placid surface of modern American family life, and explores the complicated spiritual and sexual lives of ordinary people. It is elegantly and simply written, characterized by the distinctive...

"Gorgeously evocative, Red Island House follows two decades in the life of Shay, an African-American professor whose husband Senna, a brash and wealthy Italian businessman, builds her a dream house in Madagascar."--

"Jeff Talarigo offers a rare glimpse and alternative point of view into a place few people have dared to visit: the Gaza Strip. These linked stories expose the seven-decade-long Palestinian diaspora in a disquieting allegory of the clash between the occupied and the occupier. In 1993, Talarigo watched two Palestinian boys playing with an injured bird with a string around its neck. The boys tossed the bird into the air, waiting for it to fly before...

"From the award-winning, nationally bestselling author of A Golden Age and The Good Muslim comes a lyrical, deeply moving modern love story about belonging, migration, tragedy, survival, and the mysteries of origins. On the eve of her departure to find the bones of the walking whale--the fossil that provides a missing link in our evolution--Zubaida Haque falls in love with Elijah Strong, a man she meets in a darkened concert hall in Boston. Their...

Raised in a remote seaside village, Thomas Witka Just marries Ruth, his beloved since infancy. But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival. In the end, he reconciles his two existences,...

"In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is 'the last great civil rights fight.' Tests, grades, and employment qualifications are all discarded. Children are expelled for saying the S-word ("stupid") and encouraged to report parents who...

It's 1979 and things are looking up for Eric Chung, former programmer/analyst, job grade 26. Not so long ago, he couldn't even say "Dallas Businessman," and now he is one, wheeling and dealing Texas-style. The Incorporation of Eric Chung, a first novel by Steven C. Lo, is a story of a business venture as flamboyant as our hero's adopted state. It's the American job scene, as viewed through Chinese eyes. It's the adventures of an immigrant who climbs...

About the marriage of Rama, a young Brahmin doing graduate work in France, to Madeleine, an ethereal French college teacher, some six years his senior. In her eagerness to attain Eastern wisdom, Madeleine first casts her husband in the role of guru. Later, as her "saintliness" (or madness) progresses, she transcends the need for human companionship, leaving Rama free to pursue his own search for self-awareness.

"Dayton, Tennessee. 1925. It is in this sleepy mountain town where Annabel, a devout woman, falls in love with George Craig, a cosmopolitan defense attorney. Annabel's outlook on everything from life to love to the law is shaped by her faith; George sees the law something to bend to his will, and sees a world shaped by science and reason alone. By the end of the year, their marriage, and the private battle waged within it, will come up against the...