Pat's Pick A chronicle of the two-and-a-half year journey of Lewis and Clark covers their incredible hardships and the contributions of Sacajawea. High adventure, high politics, suspense, drama, and diplomacy combine with high romance and personal tragedy to make this outstanding work of scholarship as readable as a novel. Nonfiction

Roberta's Pick  A leading baseball writer recounts his early years as a child in Prohibition-era New York, his relationships with his parents and stepfather E.B. White, and his interactions with numerous colleagues and sports figures. Nonfiction

Pat's Pick   In an epistolary tale written from the perspective of fifteen-year-old Tess to her little sister, Zoe, who died accidentally on September 11, Tess struggles to overcome her family's personal tragedy against a backdrop of the larger events occurring in the nation, a situation that is complicated by Zoe's feelings of displacement as a stepdaughter and her relationship with her irresponsible father.

Pat's Pick   Resigned to her life alone, fifty-one-year-old spinster Myra Lipinsky endures her isolation by immersing herself in her career as a visiting nurse, in which role she is reunited with Chip Reardon, the onetime golden boy she adored from afar in high school, who has returned to his New England hometown to live while he deals with an incurable illness.

Roberta's Pick  Recounts the holiday of Edith Hope, meek, unmarried, and thirty-nine, who, on the mend from a disastrous love affair, becomes intimately involved with her fellow guests at the Swiss Hotel du Lac.

Pat's Pick   A young academic couple's attempt to trace the relationship between two turbulent, romantic, and superstitious Victorian poets reveals uncanny parallels with their own lives and culminates in the exhumation of a poet's corpse.

Pat's Pick  The reminiscences of a New York lawyer, Jim Burden, about his boyhood in Nebraska, particularly a young Bohemian girl named Antonia Shimerda, are set against the backdrop of the American assimilation immigrants.

Roberta's Pick  During the summer of 1989, three generations of the Hill family arrive at the New England home of the family matriarch and maiden aunt, Lily, for a visit, but as the weeks go by, no one shows any signs of leaving.

Roberta's Pick  A portrait of French life and culture in the late twenties and thirties is presented in excerpts from the author's column in the New Yorker.  Nonfiction

Pat's Pick  A biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and an intimate look at those residing in the White House during the war years shows how Eleanor and Franklin together turned a country deep in depression into a militarily strong and economically healthy nation. Nonfiction

Pat's Pick  Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.

Pat's Pick  From the unsettled lives of a small-town teacher struggling to raise two boys alone in the face of their mother's retreat from life, a pregnant teenage girl with nowhere to go, and two elderly bachelor farmers emerges a new vision of life and family as their diverse destinies intertwine.

Pat's Pick  Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

Pat's Pick    When a plantation proprietor and former slave--now possessing slaves of his own--dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.

Roberta's Pick  Claudia Hampton, writer of best-selling popular history books, lies in a London hospital bed and looks back on her own life, including an unforgettable love affair.

Pat's Pick  In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.

Pat's Pick  Befriending an adolescent boy who is ostracized for his unusual height, bereft Cape Cod librarian Peggy Cort finds a soulmate in James and comes to love him as he grows into a man of eight feet.

Roberta's Pick  Presents a collection of the correspondence written by the director of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973, which was instrumental in the creation of such children's classics as Charlotte's Web and The Giving Tree. Nonfiction

Pat's Pick  A story told from five different points of view--a mother receiving the evacuation order, her daughter on the train ride to the camp, the son in the desert internment camp, the family's return home, and the final release of the father after years in captivity--chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.

Roberta's Pick  Determined to make a name for themselves, three adopted sisters living in London train for the ballet and the stage and in the process discover that each has a special talent. Juvenile

Roberta's Pick  The wife of a man who was institutionalized after an accident left him violently brain damaged describes her efforts to rebuild her life in a small country town with three dogs, a process during which she struggled with a very different relationship with her husband, passed her days knitting, and found comfort in friendships and her changing perceptions about life.  Nonfiction

Roberta's Pick  The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.