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Featured Guide

Dorothea Benton Frank, author of Same Beach, Next Year

A chance meeting on the Isle of Palms brings former sweethearts Adam Stanley and Eve Landers together again. Their respective spouses, Eliza and Carl, fight sparks of jealousy flaring from their imagined rekindling of old flames. As Adam and Eve get caught up on their lives, their partners strike up a deep friendship of their own. Year after year, Adam, Eliza, Eve and Carl eagerly await their reunion at Wild Dunes, a condominium complex at the island’s tip end, where they grow closer with each passing day.

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Barry Lyga, author of Bang

Sebastian Cody did something horrible, something no one --- not even Sebastian himself --- can forgive. At the age of four, he accidentally shot and killed his infant sister with his father's gun. Now, 10 years later, Sebastian has lived with the guilt and horror for his entire life. With his best friend away for the summer, Sebastian has only a new friend --- Aneesa --- to distract him from his darkest thoughts. But even this relationship cannot blunt the pain of his past. Because Sebastian knows exactly how to rectify his childhood crime and sanctify his past.

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Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing

Ghana, 18th century: Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the notorious Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and shipped off to America to be sold into slavery.

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Mark Sullivan, author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky

When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino Lella joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino’s parents force him to enlist as a German soldier, which they think will keep him out of combat. But after Pino is injured, he is recruited at the age of 18 to become the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left hand in Italy, General Hans Leyers.

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Benjamin Ludwig, author of Ginny Moon

Ginny Moon, an autistic teenager, has been in foster care for years, and for the first time in her life, she has found her "forever home" --- a place where she'll be safe and protected, with a family who will love and nurture her. Though this is exactly the kind of home that all foster kids are hoping for, Ginny has other plans. She'll steal and lie and reach across her past to exploit the good intentions of those who love her --- anything it takes to get back what's missing in her life. She'll even try to get herself kidnapped.

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Amita Trasi, author of The Color of Our Sky

India, 1986: Mukta, a 10-year-old village girl, has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a temple prostitute. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past. But one night in 1993, Mukta is kidnapped from Tara’s family home and disappears. Eleven years later, Tara returns to India determined to find Mukta.

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Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of Before We Visit the Goddess

As the young daughter of a poor rural baker, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but schooling is impossible on the meager profits from her mother’s sweetshop. When a powerful local woman takes Sabitri under her wing, her generous offer soon proves dangerous after Sabitri makes a single, unforgiveable misstep. Years later, Sabitri’s own daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother’s choices, flees to America with her political refugee lover --- but the world she finds is vastly different from her dreams.

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Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of World War II and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. THE NIGHTINGALE tells the stories of two sisters --- separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance --- each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France.

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Ellen Herrick, author of The Forbidden Garden

At the nursery she runs with her sisters on the New England coast, Sorrel Sparrow has honed her rare gift for nurturing plants and flowers. Now that reputation, and a stroke of good timing, lands Sorrel an unexpected opportunity: reviving a long-dormant Shakespearean garden on an English country estate. Arriving at Kirkwood Hall, ancestral home of Sir Graham Kirkwood and his wife Stella, Sorrel is shocked by the desolate state of the walled garden. Generations have tried --- and failed --- to bring it back to glory. Sorrel senses heartbreak and betrayal here, perhaps even enchantment.

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Lisa See, author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. For the Akha people, life goes on as it has for generations --- until a stranger appears at the village gate. Slowly, Li-yan begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlock, she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her near an orphanage. Despite being raised by loving adoptive parents, Li-yan’s daughter, Haley, wonders about her origins.

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