Nidhi's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 12 Apr 2025 11:57:31 -0700 60 Nidhi's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]>
544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Nidhi 0 to-read 4.17 2022 Babel
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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Good Material 96177629
Now he is. . .

Without a home

Waiting for his stand-up career to take off

Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story…

In this sharply funny and exquisitely relatable story of romantic disaster and friendship, Dolly Alderton offers up a love story with two endings, demonstrating once again why she is one of the most exciting writers today, and the true voice of a generation.]]>
345 Dolly Alderton 0241523672 Nidhi 0 to-read 3.85 2023 Good Material
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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Ghosts 221200339
A new relationship couldn't have come at a better time - her thirties have not been the liberating, uncomplicated experience she was sold. Everywhere she turns, she is reminded of time passing and opportunities dwindling. Friendships are fading, ex-boyfriends are moving on and, worse, everyone's moving to the suburbs. There's no solace to be found in her family, with a mum who's caught in a baffling mid-life makeover and a beloved dad who is vanishing in slow-motion into dementia.

Dolly Alderton's debut novel is funny and tender, filled with whip-smart observations about relationships, family, memory, and how we live now.]]>
320 Dolly Alderton 0241988683 Nidhi 0 to-read 3.83 2020 Ghosts
author: Dolly Alderton
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory]]> 41949311
“Transcendent tragicomedy.... Prepare to be devastated and made whole again.” —The A.V. Club

Featuring:

• A young engaged couple forced to deal with interfering relatives dictating the appropriate number of ritual goat sacrifices for their wedding.

• A pair of lonely commuters who ride the subway in silence, forever, eternally failing to make that longed-for contact.

• A struggling employee at a theme park of U.S. presidents who discovers that love can’t be genetically modified.

And fifteen more tales of humor, romance, whimsy, cultural commentary, and crushing emotional vulnerability.]]>
256 Raphael Bob-Waksberg Nidhi 0 to-read 4.04 2019 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory
author: Raphael Bob-Waksberg
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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Cloud Cuckoo Land 56783258 When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive.

How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.

Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.

Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?

Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.

Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.]]>
626 Anthony Doerr 1982168439 Nidhi 0 to-read 4.24 2021 Cloud Cuckoo Land
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)]]> 17465515 My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrĂŠe into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]>
471 Elena Ferrante Nidhi 4 4.47 2012 The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels, #2)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
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<![CDATA[Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)]]> 23156040 418 Elena Ferrante Nidhi 4 4.38 2013 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2013
rating: 4
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<![CDATA[My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)]]> 35036409 My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship. Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighbourhood, a city and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her two protagonists.]]> 331 Elena Ferrante Nidhi 5 4.08 2011 My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels, #1)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories]]> 18143905
Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.

As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her unforgettable last essay for the Yale Daily News, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits. She had struck a chord.

Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. The Opposite of Loneliness is an assem­blage of Marina’s essays and stories that, like The Last Lecture, articulates the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to make an impact on the world.]]>
208 Marina Keegan 147675361X Nidhi 5 3.86 2014 The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories
author: Marina Keegan
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2016/07/12
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The Song of Achilles 13623848 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062060624.

Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.]]>
408 Madeline Miller Nidhi 5 4.30 2011 The Song of Achilles
author: Madeline Miller
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/12
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The Palace of Illusions 1774836
Relevant to today’s war-torn world, The Palace of Illusions takes us back to a time that is half history, half myth, and wholly magical. Narrated by Panchaali, the wife of the legendary Pandavas brothers in the Mahabharat, the novel gives us a new interpretation of this ancient tale.

The Palace of Illusions traces the princess Panchaali's life, beginning with her birth in fire and following her spirited balancing act as a woman with five husbands who have been cheated out of their father’s kingdom. Panchaali is swept into their quest to reclaim their birthright, remaining at their side through years of exile and a terrible civil war involving all the important kings of India. Meanwhile, we never lose sight of her strategic duels with her mother-in-law, her complicated friendship withĚýthe enigmatic Krishna, or her secretĚýattraction toĚýthe mysteriousĚýman who is her husbands'Ěýmost dangerousĚýenemy. Panchaali is a fiery female redefining for us a world of warriors, gods, and the ever-manipulating hands of fate.]]>
360 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni 0385515995 Nidhi 4 4.20 2008 The Palace of Illusions
author: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/12
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Americana 39321561
„Nemilos de tranșant și incredibil de empatic… un roman care expune intrepid realitățile inconfortabile ale vremurilor noastre… O disecție precisă a experienței umane universale.”

The New York Times, 10 Best Books of 2013

„Atât de inteligent despre atât de multe subiecte, încât eticheta de roman despre ce înseamnă să fii negru în secolul XXI nu cuprinde nici pe departe profunzimea și anvergura textului… Vast, captivant și autentic.”

NPR

„Adichie descoperă perspectiva unică din care compară ierarhiile rasiale din Statele Unite ale Americii și Marea Britanie cu lupta pentru statut social din Nigeria. Și o face cu o onestitate nemiloasă, descriind frumusețea și urâțenia acestor spații.”

The Washington Post]]>
568 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 6069450744 Nidhi 5 4.41 2013 Americana
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2020/04/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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The Female of the Species 25812109
Alex Craft knows how to kill someone. And she doesn’t feel bad about it.

Three years ago, when her older sister, Anna, was murdered and the killer walked free, Alex uncaged the language she knows best—the language of violence. While her own crime goes unpunished, Alex knows she can’t be trusted among other people. Not with Jack, the star athlete who wants to really know her but still feels guilty over the role he played the night Anna’s body was discovered. And not with Peekay, the preacher’s kid with a defiant streak who befriends Alex while they volunteer at an animal shelter. Not anyone.

As their senior year unfolds, Alex’s darker nature breaks out, setting these three teens on a collision course that will change their lives forever.]]>
368 Mindy McGinnis Nidhi 5 4.14 2016 The Female of the Species
author: Mindy McGinnis
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2017/05/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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A Little Life 22822858
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.ĚýYet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.]]>
720 Hanya Yanagihara 0385539258 Nidhi 3 4.28 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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<![CDATA[The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo]]> 32620332
Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of why Evelyn has selected her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ‘80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.]]>
389 Taylor Jenkins Reid 1501139231 Nidhi 2 4.39 2017 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2022/11/12
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If You See Me, Don't Say Hi 35969834
If You See Me, Don't Say Hi examines the collisions of old world and new world, small town and big city, traditional beliefs (like arranged marriage) and modern rituals (like Facebook stalking). The men and women in these stories are full of passion, regret, envy, anger, and yearning. They fall in love with the wrong people and betray one another and deal with the accumulation of years of subtle racism. They are utterly compelling. Ranging across the country, Patel’s stories -- empathetic, provocative, twisting, and wryly funny -- introduce a bold new literary voice, one that feels more timely than ever.]]>
224 Neel Patel 1250183197 Nidhi 3 3.79 2018 If You See Me, Don't Say Hi
author: Neel Patel
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2019/08/12
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Putney 36421256 Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man twenty years her senior.

A rising star in the London arts scene of the early 1970s, gifted composer Ralph Boyd is approached by renowned novelist Edmund Greenslay to score a stage adaptation of his most famous work. Welcomed into Greenslay’s sprawling bohemian house in Putney, an artistic and prosperous district in southwest London, the musical wunderkind is introduced to Edmund’s beautiful activist wife Ellie, his aloof son Theo, and his nine-year old daughter Daphne, who quickly becomes Ralph’s muse.

Ralph showers Daphne with tokens of his affection—clandestine gifts and secret notes. In a home that is exciting but often lonely, Daphne finds Ralph to be a dazzling companion. Their bond remains strong even after Ralph becomes a husband and father, and though Ralph worships Daphne, he does not touch her. But in the summer of 1976, when Ralph accompanies thirteen-year-old Daphne alone to meet her parents in Greece, their relationship intensifies irrevocably. One person knows of their passionate trysts: Daphne’s best friend Jane, whose awe of the intoxicating Greenslay family ensures her silence.

Forty years later Daphne is back in London. After years lost to decadence and drug abuse, she is struggling to create a normal, stable life for herself and her adolescent daughter. When circumstances bring her back in touch with her long-lost friend, Jane, their reunion inevitably turns to Ralph, now a world-famous musician also living in the city. Daphne’s recollections of her childhood and her growing anxiety over her own young daughter eventually lead to an explosive realization that propels her to confront Ralph and their years spent together.

Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints—victim, perpetrator, and witness—Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.]]>
384 Sofka Zinovieff 0062847597 Nidhi 3 3.90 2018 Putney
author: Sofka Zinovieff
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/12
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Conversations with Friends 32187419 A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed, and darkly observant. A college student and aspiring writer, she devotes herself to a life of the mind--and to the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi, her best friend and comrade-in-arms. Lovers at school, the two young women now perform spoken-word poetry together in Dublin, where a journalist named Melissa spots their potential. Drawn into Melissa's orbit, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband. Private property, Frances believes, is a cultural evil--and Nick, a bored actor who never quite lived up to his potential, looks like patriarchy made flesh. But however amusing their flirtation seems at first, it gives way to a strange intimacy neither of them expect. As Frances tries to keep her life in check, her relationships increasingly resist her control: with Nick, with her difficult and unhappy father, and finally even with Bobbi. Desperate to reconcile herself to the desires and vulnerabilities of her body, Frances's intellectual certainties begin to yield to something new: a painful and disorienting way of living from moment to moment.

Written with gem-like precision and probing intelligence, Conversations With Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth."]]>
304 Sally Rooney 0451499077 Nidhi 4 3.74 2017 Conversations with Friends
author: Sally Rooney
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2020/06/12
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Sour Heart 32956008 Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. In this debut collection, she conjures the disturbing and often hilarious experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God.

Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat — dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck — these seven stories showcase Zhang's compassion and moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy's Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.]]>
307 Jenny Zhang 0399589384 Nidhi 4 3.70 2017 Sour Heart
author: Jenny Zhang
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2019/09/12
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Normal People 41057294
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.]]>
273 Sally Rooney 1984822179 Nidhi 4 3.81 2018 Normal People
author: Sally Rooney
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/07/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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The Silent Patient 40097951
Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London.

Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....

The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive.]]>
336 Alex Michaelides 1250301696 Nidhi 3 4.17 2019 The Silent Patient
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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The Immortalists 30288282 If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?

It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.

The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.

A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.]]>
346 Chloe Benjamin 0735213186 Nidhi 4 3.68 2018 The Immortalists
author: Chloe Benjamin
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2019/07/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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Where the Crawdads Sing 36809135
But Kya is not what they say. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life's lessons from the land, learning the real ways of the world from the dishonest signals of fireflies. But while she has the skills to live in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world—until the unthinkable happens.

In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a profound coming of age story and haunting mystery. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the child within us, while also subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

The story asks how isolation influences the behavior of a young woman, who like all of us, has the genetic propensity to belong to a group. The clues to the mystery are brushed into the lush habitat and natural histories of its wild creatures.]]>
384 Delia Owens 0735219117 Nidhi 4 4.35 2018 Where the Crawdads Sing
author: Delia Owens
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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<![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]>
401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Nidhi 4 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/03/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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<![CDATA[Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life]]> 50887097 A wondrous debut from an extraordinary new voice in nonfiction, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder.

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.

Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.

When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.

Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist reads like a fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.]]>
225 Lulu Miller Nidhi 4 4.15 2020 Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
author: Lulu Miller
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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The Vanishing Half 51791252
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.]]>
343 Brit Bennett 0525536299 Nidhi 5 4.11 2020 The Vanishing Half
author: Brit Bennett
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2023/08/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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Burnt Sugar 52969580
Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Burnt Sugar unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds mother and daughter. Is Tara’s memory loss real? Are Antara’s memories fair? In vivid and visceral prose, Tibor Jones South Asia Prize–winning writer Avni Doshi tells a story, at once shocking and empathetic, about love and betrayal between a mother and a daughter. A journey into shifting memories, altering identities, and the subjective nature of truth, Burnt Sugar is a stunning and unforgettable debut.]]>
240 Avni Doshi 024144151X Nidhi 3 3.25 2019 Burnt Sugar
author: Avni Doshi
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.25
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/12
date added: 2025/04/12
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<![CDATA[The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)]]> 25242224 The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women — the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up — a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.]]>
473 Elena Ferrante 1609452860 Nidhi 4 4.47 2014 The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels, #4)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/05
date added: 2025/04/12
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Good Dirt 213618132 The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well.

The crime was never solved—and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England—the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.

So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago—the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history—it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.

In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.]]>
368 Charmaine Wilkerson 0593358368 Nidhi 0 to-read 4.03 2025 Good Dirt
author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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Kaikeyi 57127277 “I was born on the full moon under an auspicious constellation, the holiest of positions—much good it did me.”

So begins Kaikeyi’s story. The only daughter of the kingdom of Kekaya, she is raised on tales about the might and benevolence of the gods: how they churned the vast ocean to obtain the nectar of immortality, how they vanquish evil and ensure the land of Bharat prospers, and how they offer powerful boons to the worthy. Yet she watches as her father unceremoniously banishes her mother, listens as her own worth is reduced to the marriage alliance she can secure. And when she calls upon the gods for help, they never seem to hear.

Desperate for independence, she turns to the texts she once read with her mother and discovers a magic that is hers alone. With it, Kaikeyi transforms herself from an overlooked princess into a warrior, diplomat, and most favored queen.

But as the evil from her childhood stories threatens the cosmic order, the path she has forged clashes with the destiny the gods have chosen for her family. And Kaikeyi must decide if resistance is worth the destruction it will wreak—and what legacy she intends to leave behind.

The unforgettable tale of a woman determined to leave her mark in a world gods and men dictate the shape of things to come. "Patel's mesmerizing debut shines a brilliant light on the vilified queen from the Ramayana"
(Publishers Weekly, starred review).
]]>
478 Vaishnavi Patel 0759557330 Nidhi 0 to-read 4.18 2022 Kaikeyi
author: Vaishnavi Patel
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[What You Are Looking For Is in the Library]]> 91274427 For fans of The Midnight Library and Before the Coffee Gets Cold, this charming Japanese novel shows how the perfect book recommendation can change a reader's life.

What are you looking for?

This is the famous question routinely asked by Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. Like most librarians, Komachi has read every book lining her shelves—but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of her library guests. For anyone who walks through her door, Komachi can sense exactly what they’re looking for in life and provide just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.

Each visitor comes to her library from a different juncture in their careers and dreams, from the restless sales attendant who feels stuck at her job to the struggling working mother who longs to be a magazineĚýeditor. The conversation that they have with Sayuri Komachi—and the surprise book she lends each of them—will have life-altering consequences.

With heartwarming charm and wisdom, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library is a paean to the magic of libraries, friendship and community, perfect for anyone who has ever found themselves at an impasse in their life and in need of a little inspiration.]]>
304 Michiko Aoyama 1335005625 Nidhi 0 currently-reading 4.06 2020 What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
author: Michiko Aoyama
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]>
331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Nidhi 0 currently-reading 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]>
454 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Nidhi 0 to-read 3.86 2024 Intermezzo
author: Sally Rooney
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)]]> 16069030 Winning what you want may cost you everything you love...Ěý

As a general’s daughter in a vast empire that revels in war and enslaves those it conquers, seventeen-year-old Kestrel has two choices: she can join the military or get married. But Kestrel has other intentions.

One day, she is startled to find a kindred spirit in a young slave up for auction. Arin’s eyes seem to defy everything and everyone. Following her instinct, Kestrel buys him—with unexpected consequences. It’s not long before she has to hide her growing love for Arin.

But he, too, has a secret, and Kestrel quickly learns that the price she paid for a fellow human is much higher than she ever could have imagined.

Set in a richly imagined new world, The Winner’s Curse by Marie Rutkoski is a story of deadly games where everything is at stake, and the gamble is whether you will keep your head or lose your heart.]]>
355 Marie Rutkoski 0374384681 Nidhi 5 3.94 2014 The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1)
author: Marie Rutkoski
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2014
rating: 5
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Good Omens (Discworld) 153764678 Good Omens (Discworld) 300 Terry Pratchett Nidhi 0 4.33 1990 Good Omens (Discworld)
author: Terry Pratchett
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1990
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)]]> 8755785
Sebastian Morgenstern is on the move, systematically turning Shadowhunter against Shadowhunter. Bearing the Infernal Cup, he transforms Shadowhunters into creatures out of nightmare, tearing apart families and lovers as the ranks of his Endarkened army swell.

The embattled Shadowhunters withdraw to Idris - but not even the famed demon towers of Alicante can keep Sebastian at bay. And with the Nephilim trapped in Idris, who will guard the world against demons?

When one of the greatest betrayals the Nephilim have ever known is revealed, Clary, Jace, Isabelle, Simon, and Alec must flee - even if their journey takes them deep into the demon realms, where no Shadowhunter has set foot before, and from which no human being has ever returned...

Love will be sacrificed and lives lost in the terrible battle for the fate of the word in the thrilling final installment of the classic urban fantasy series The Mortal Instruments!]]>
725 Cassandra Clare 1481426303 Nidhi 0 4.38 2014 City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)]]> 18335634
THE INFERNAL DEVICES WILL NEVER STOP COMING

A net of shadows begins to tighten around the Shadowhunters of the London Institute. Mortmain plans to use his Infernal Devices, an army of pitiless automatons, to destroy the Shadowhunters. He needs only one last item to complete his plan: he needs Tessa Gray.

Charlotte Branwell, head of the London Institute, is desperate to find Mortmain before he strikes. But when Mortmain abducts Tessa, the boys who lay equal claim to her heart, Jem and Will, will do anything to save her. For though Tessa and Jem are now engaged, Will is as much in love with her as ever.

As those who love Tessa rally to rescue her from Mortmain’s clutches, Tessa realizes that the only person who can save her is herself. But can a single girl, even one who can command the power of angels, face down an entire army?

Danger and betrayal, secrets and enchantment, and the tangled threads of love and loss intertwine as the Shadowhunters are pushed to the very brink of destruction in the breathtaking conclusion to the Infernal Devices trilogy.]]>
567 Cassandra Clare 1406321346 Nidhi 0 4.55 2013 Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments, #4)]]> 6752378 425 Cassandra Clare 1442403543 Nidhi 0 4.09 2011 City of Fallen Angels (The Mortal Instruments, #4)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices, #1)]]> 25494343 Lady Midnight is a Shadowhunters novel.

It’s been five years since the events of City of Heavenly Fire that brought the Shadowhunters to the brink of oblivion. Emma Carstairs is no longer a child in mourning, but a young woman bent on discovering what killed her parents and avenging her losses.

Together with her parabatai Julian Blackthorn, Emma must learn to trust her head and her heart as she investigates a demonic plot that stretches across Los Angeles, from the Sunset Strip to the enchanted sea that pounds the beaches of Santa Monica. If only her heart didn’t lead her in treacherous directions…

Making things even more complicated, Julian’s brother Mark—who was captured by the faeries five years ago—has been returned as a bargaining chip. The faeries are desperate to find out who is murdering their kind—and they need the Shadowhunters’ help to do it. But time works differently in faerie, so Mark has barely aged and doesn’t recognize his family. Can he ever truly return to them? Will the faeries really allow it?

Glitz, glamours, and Shadowhunters abound in this heartrending opening to Cassandra Clare’s Dark Artifices series.]]>
688 Cassandra Clare 1442468351 Nidhi 0 4.35 2016 Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices, #1)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)]]> 3777732 Also see: Alternate Cover Editions for this ISBN [ACE]
ACE #1

To save her mother's life, Clary must travel to the City of Glass, the ancestral home of the Shadowhunters - never mind that entering the city without permission is against the Law, and breaking the Law could mean death. To make things worse, she learns that Jace does not want her there, and Simon has been thrown in prison by the Shadowhunters, who are deeply suspicious of a vampire who can withstand sunlight.

As Clary uncovers more about her family's past, she finds an ally in mysterious Shadowhunter Sebastian. With Valentine mustering the full force of his power to destroy all Shadowhunters forever, their only chance to defeat him is to fight alongside their eternal enemies. But can Downworlders and Shadowhunters put aside their hatred to work together? While Jace realizes exactly how much he's willing to risk for Clary, can she harness her newfound powers to help save the Glass City - whatever the cost?

Love is a mortal sin and the secrets of the past prove deadly as Clary and Jace face down Valentine in the third installment of the New York Times bestselling series The Mortal Instruments.]]>
541 Cassandra Clare 1416914307 Nidhi 0 4.27 2009 City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2)]]> 10025305
With the help of the handsome, self-destructive Will and the fiercely devoted Jem, Tessa discovers that the Magister’s war on the Shadowhunters is deeply personal. He blames them for a long-ago tragedy that shattered his life. To unravel the secrets of the past, the trio journeys from mist-shrouded Yorkshire to a manor house that holds untold horrors, from the slums of London to an enchanted ballroom where Tessa discovers that the truth of her parentage is more sinister than she had imagined. When they encounter a clockwork demon bearing a warning for Will, they realize that the Magister himself knows their every move—and that one of their own has betrayed them.

Tessa finds her heart drawn more and more to Jem, but her longing for Will, despite his dark moods, continues to unsettle her. But something is changing in Will—the wall he has built around himself is crumbling. Could finding the Magister free Will from his secrets and give Tessa the answers about who she is and what she was born to do?

As their dangerous search for the Magister and the truth leads the friends into peril, Tessa learns that when love and lies are mixed, they can corrupt even the purest heart.]]>
498 Cassandra Clare 1416975888 Nidhi 0 4.42 2011 Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2)]]> 1582996 Also see: Alternate Cover Editions for this ISBN [ACE]
ACE #1

Clary Fray just wishes that her life would go back to normal. But what's normal when you're a demon-slaying Shadowhunter, your mother is in a magically induced coma, and you can suddenly see Downworlders like werewolves, vampires, and faeries? If Clary left the world of the Shadowhunters behind, it would mean more time with her best friend, Simon, who's becoming more than a friend. But the Shadowhunting world isn't ready to let her go — especially her handsome, infuriating, newfound brother, Jace. And Clary's only chance to help her mother is to track down rogue Shadowhunter Valentine, who is probably insane, certainly evil — and also her father.

To complicate matters, someone in New York City is murdering Downworlder children. Is Valentine behind the killings — and if he is, what is he trying to do? When the second of the Mortal Instruments, the Soul-Sword, is stolen, the terrifying Inquisitor arrives to investigate and zooms right in on Jace. How can Clary stop Valentine if Jace is willing to betray everything he believes in to help their father?

In this breathtaking sequel to City of Bones, Cassandra Clare lures her readers back into the dark grip of New York City's Downworld, where love is never safe and power becomes the deadliest temptation.]]>
453 Cassandra Clare 1416914293 Nidhi 0 4.12 2008 City of Ashes (The Mortal Instruments, #2)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1)]]> 7171637 New York Times bestselling Mortal Instruments series.

The year is 1878. Tessa Gray descends into London’s dark supernatural underworld in search of her missing brother. She soon discovers that her only allies are the demon-slaying Shadowhunters—including Will and Jem, the mysterious boys she is attracted to. Soon they find themselves up against the Pandemonium Club, a secret organization of vampires, demons, warlocks, and humans. Equipped with a magical army of unstoppable clockwork creatures, the Club is out to rule the British Empire, and only Tessa and her allies can stop them...]]>
479 Cassandra Clare 1416975861 Nidhi 0 4.31 2010 Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)]]> 256683
This is Clary's first meeting with the Shadowhunters, warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons. It's also her first encounter with Jace, a Shadowhunter who looks a little like an angel and acts a lot like a jerk. Within twenty-four hours Clary is pulled into Jace's world with a vengeance when her mother disappears and Clary herself is attacked by a demon. But why would demons be interested in ordinary mundanes like Clary and her mother? And how did Clary suddenly get the Sight? The Shadowhunters would like to know...]]>
485 Cassandra Clare 1416914285 Nidhi 0 4.08 2007 City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1)
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)]]> 17378527
All her life, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love's death. She doesn't believe in true love and never thought this would be a problem, but as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she's not so sure anymore.]]>
439 Maggie Stiefvater 0545424984 Nidhi 0 4.26 2016 The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)]]> 17378508
Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs.

The trick with found things, though, is how easily they can be lost.

Friends can betray.
Mothers can disappear.
Visions can mislead.
Certainties can unravel.]]>
391 Maggie Stiefvater 0545424968 Nidhi 0 4.26 2014 Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)]]> 17347389 439 Maggie Stiefvater 0545424941 Nidhi 0 4.22 2013 The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1)]]> 17675462 “There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve,” Neeve said. “Either you’re his true love . . . or you killed him.”

It is freezing in the churchyard, even before the dead arrive.

Every year, Blue Sargent stands next to her clairvoyant mother as the soon-to-be dead walk past. Blue herself never sees them—not until this year, when a boy emerges from the dark and speaks directly to her.

His name is Gansey, and Blue soon discovers that he is a rich student at Aglionby, the local private school. Blue has a policy of staying away from Aglionby boys. Known as Raven Boys, they can only mean trouble.

But Blue is drawn to Gansey, in a way she can’t entirely explain. He has it all—family money, good looks, devoted friends—but he’s looking for much more than that. He is on a quest that has encompassed three other Raven Boys: Adam, the scholarship student who resents all the privilege around him; Ronan, the fierce soul who ranges from anger to despair; and Noah, the taciturn watcher of the four, who notices many things but says very little.

For as long as she can remember, Blue has been warned that she will cause her true love to die. She never thought this would be a problem. But now, as her life becomes caught up in the strange and sinister world of the Raven Boys, she’s not so sure anymore.]]>
409 Maggie Stiefvater 0545424925 Nidhi 0 4.05 2012 The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1)
author: Maggie Stiefvater
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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I'll Give You the Sun 20820994
Years later, they are barely speaking. Something has happened to change the twins in different yet equally devastating ways... but then Jude meets an intriguing, irresistible boy and a mysterious new mentor. The early years are Noah's to tell; the later years are Jude's. But they each have only half the story, and if they can only find their way back to one another, they'll have a chance to remake their world.

This radiant, award-winning novel from the acclaimed author of The Sky Is Everywhere will leave you breathless and teary and laughing—often all at once.

Printz Award Winner Stonewall Honor Book.]]>
371 Jandy Nelson 0803734964 Nidhi 0 4.14 2014 I'll Give You the Sun
author: Jandy Nelson
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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The Sky Is Everywhere 6604794
Join Lennie on this heartbreaking and hilarious journey of profound sorrow and mad love, as she makes colossal mistakes and colossal discoveries, as she traipses through band rooms and forest bedrooms and ultimately right into your heart.

As much a celebration of love as a poignant portrait of loss, Lennie's struggle to sort her own melody out of the noise around her is always honest, often uproarious, and absolutely unforgettable.]]>
288 Jandy Nelson 0803734956 Nidhi 0 3.97 2010 The Sky Is Everywhere
author: Jandy Nelson
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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The Time Keeper 13624688 In this fable, the first man on earth to count the hours becomes Father Time.

The inventor of the world's first clock is punished for trying to measure God's greatest gift. He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years. Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.

He returns to our world - now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began - and commences a journey with two unlikely partners: one a teenage girl who is about to give up on life, the other a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever. To save himself, he must save them both. And stop the world to do so.]]>
224 Mitch Albom 1401322786 Nidhi 0 3.88 2012 The Time Keeper
author: Mitch Albom
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2012
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<![CDATA[Have a Little Faith: a True Story]]> 1255781 In Have a Little Faith, Mitch Albom offers a beautifully written story of a remarkable eight-year journey between two worlds--two men, two faiths, two communities--that will inspire readers everywhere.

Albom's first nonfiction book since Tuesdays with Morrie, Have a Little Faith begins with an unusual request: an eighty-two-year-old rabbi from Albom's old hometown asks him to deliver his eulogy.

Feeling unworthy, Albom insists on understanding the man better, which throws him back into a world of faith he'd left years ago. Meanwhile, closer to his current home, Albom becomes involved with a Detroit pastor--a reformed drug dealer and convict--who preaches to the poor and homeless in a decaying church with a hole in its roof.

Moving between their worlds, Christian and Jewish, African-American and white, impoverished and well-to-do, Albom observes how these very different men employ faith similarly in fighting for survival: the older, suburban rabbi embracing it as death approaches; the younger, inner-city pastor relying on it to keep himself and his church afloat.

As America struggles with hard times and people turn more to their beliefs, Albom and the two men of God explore issues that perplex modern man: how to endure when difficult things happen; what heaven is; intermarriage; forgiveness; doubting God; and the importance of faith in trying times. Although the texts, prayers, and histories are different, Albom begins to recognize a striking unity between the two worlds--and indeed, between beliefs everywhere.

In the end, as the rabbi nears death and a harsh winter threatens the pastor's wobbly church, Albom sadly fulfills the rabbi's last request and writes the eulogy. And he finally understands what both men had been teaching all along: the profound comfort of believing in something bigger than yourself.

Have a Little Faith is a book about a life's purpose; about losing belief and finding it again; about the divine spark inside us all. It is one man's journey, but it is everyone's story.

Ten percent of the profits from this book will go to charity, including The Hole In The Roof Foundation, which helps refurbish places of worship that aid the homeless.

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249 Mitch Albom 0786868724 Nidhi 0 4.18 2009 Have a Little Faith: a True Story
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average rating: 4.18
book published: 2009
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<![CDATA[The Five People You Meet in Heaven]]> 3431
Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination. It's a place where your life is explained to you by five people, some of whom you knew, others who may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?"]]>
196 Mitch Albom 0786868716 Nidhi 0 4.01 2003 The Five People You Meet in Heaven
author: Mitch Albom
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2003
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<![CDATA[Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson]]> 6900
Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you?

Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.]]>
210 Mitch Albom Nidhi 0 4.19 1997 Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson
author: Mitch Albom
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.19
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Requiem (Delirium, #3) 9593913 Pandemonium has ignited into an all-out revolution in Requiem, and Lena is at the center of the fight. After rescuing Julian from a death sentence, Lena and her friends fled to the Wilds. But the Wilds are no longer a safe haven. Pockets of rebellion have opened throughout the country, and the government cannot deny the existence of Invalids. Regulators infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels.

As Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain of the Wilds, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancĂŠe of the young mayor.Requiem is told from the perspectives of both Lena and her friend Hana. They live side by side in a world that divides them until, at last, their stories converge.]]>
391 Lauren Oliver 0062014536 Nidhi 0 3.73 2013 Requiem (Delirium, #3)
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Pandemonium (Delirium, #2) 9593911 Zrozpaczona przystępuje do ruchu oporu, by walczyć o wolność i [miłość]. Na jej drodze staje tajemniczy Julian.

Czy można pokochać największego wroga?]]>
375 Lauren Oliver 006197806X Nidhi 0 4.03 2012 Pandemonium (Delirium, #2)
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average rating: 4.03
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Delirium (Delirium, #1) 11614718 There is an alternate cover edition for this ISBN13 here.

In an alternate United States, love has been declared a dangerous disease, and the government forces everyone who reaches eighteen to have a procedure called the Cure. Living with her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Portland, Maine, Lena Haloway is very much looking forward to being cured and living a safe, predictable life. She watched love destroy her mother and isn't about to make the same mistake.

But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena meets enigmatic Alex, a boy from the "Wilds" who lives under the government's radar. What will happen if they do the unthinkable and fall in love?]]>
441 Lauren Oliver 0061726834 Nidhi 0 3.94 2011 Delirium (Delirium, #1)
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average rating: 3.94
book published: 2011
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<![CDATA[Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1)]]> 9969571 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

IN THE YEAR 2044, reality is an ugly place. The only time teenage Wade Watts really feels alive is when he's jacked into the virtual utopia known as the OASIS. Wade's devoted his life to studying the puzzles hidden within this world's digital confines, puzzles that are based on their creator's obsession with the pop culture of decades past and that promise massive power and fortune to whoever can unlock them.

But when Wade stumbles upon the first clue, he finds himself beset by players willing to kill to take this ultimate prize. The race is on, and if Wade's going to survive, he'll have to win—and confront the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.]]>
480 Ernest Cline 030788743X Nidhi 0 4.21 2011 Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1)
author: Ernest Cline
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The God of Small Things 9777
Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen." With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.

The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.

The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes—Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic.]]>
321 Arundhati Roy 0679457313 Nidhi 0 3.97 1997 The God of Small Things
author: Arundhati Roy
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.97
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Fahrenheit 451 13079982 Sixty years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.]]>
194 Ray Bradbury Nidhi 0 3.97 1953 Fahrenheit 451
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Our Numbered Days 24471629 63 Neil Hilborn Nidhi 0 4.10 2015 Our Numbered Days
author: Neil Hilborn
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<![CDATA[You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism]]> 24611657 The author of Don’t Worry It Gets Worse takes on the F-word

Alida Nugent’s first book, Don’t Worry It Gets Worse, received terrific reviews, and her self-deprecating “everygirl” approach continues to win the Internet-savvy writer and blogger new fans. Now, she takes on one of today’s hottest cultural topics: feminism.

Nugent is a proud feminist—and she’s not afraid to say it. From the “scarlet F” thrust upon you if you declare yourself a feminist at a party to how to handle judgmental store clerks when you buy Plan B, You Don’t Have to Like Me skewers a range of cultural issues, and confirms Nugent as a star on the rise.]]>
218 Alida Nugent 0142181684 Nidhi 0 3.84 2015 You Don't Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism
author: Alida Nugent
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average rating: 3.84
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Wait, Blink 36378795 256 Gunnhild Øyehaug 0374285896 Nidhi 0 3.51 2008 Wait, Blink
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The Bell Jar 6514 294 Sylvia Plath 0571268862 Nidhi 0 4.05 1963 The Bell Jar
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When Watched 28186245 Core's nineteen stories, set in and around New York City, have an other-worldly quality along with a deep seriousness—even a moral seriousness. What we know of identity is smashed and in its place, true individuals emerge, each bristling with a unique sexuality, a belief-system all their own. Reminiscent of Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, and Colette, her writing glows with an authenticity that is intoxicating and rare.Ěý

A National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
Whiting Award Winner
PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction & The Story]]>
240 Leopoldine Core Nidhi 0 3.90 2016 When Watched
author: Leopoldine Core
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<![CDATA[Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life]]> 39872 Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and just see for yourself how people everywhere are responding to this book.

In Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy Krouse Rosenthal has ingeniously adapted the centuries-old format of the encyclopedia to convey the accumulated knowledge of her lifetime in a poignant, wise, often funny, fully realized memoir. Using mostly short entries organized from A to Z, many of which are cross-referenced, Rosenthal captures in wonderful and episodic detail the moments, observations, and emotions that comprise a contemporary life. Start anywhere—preferably at the beginning—and see how one young woman’s alphabetized existence can open up and define the world in new and unexpected ways.

An ordinary life, perhaps, but an extraordinary book.

Cross-section of ordinary life at this exact moment

A security guard is loosening his belt.
A couple is at a sushi restaurant with some old friends. They are reminiscing. In the back of their minds, they are thinking of being home.
A woman is trying to suck on a cherry Lifesaver but will end up biting it in six seconds.
A little boy is riding the train home with his dad after spending the day together at his office.
A man is running back into a grocery store to look for a scarf he dropped. He will leave with the phone number of a woman who will become his wife.

Words the author meant to use
Flair, Luxurious, Panoply, Churlish, Dainty, Folly

Wines that go nicely with this book

reds: Marcel Lapierre Morgon (France), Alario Dolcetto d’Alba Costa Fiore (Italy) whites: King Estate Pinot Gris (Oregon), Landmark Chardonnay Overlook (California

Book, standing in the bookstore holding a

If I am standing there with the book in my hand, one of three things has already happened: Friend recommended it. Read a good review. Cover caught my eye. I can appreciate a cool cover. But it’s like the extra credit part of a test—it only enhances an already solid grade. Getting it right won’t help if most everything else is wrong. And getting it wrong won’t hurt if most everything else is right. (There are countless books I cherish whose covers I don’t like too much, or cannot even now recall.) The interior of the book—the terrain of its pages, where all those words took me, the tiny but very real spot it ultimately occupies in my mind—that becomes the book. Next I go to the flaps. The front flap needs to intrigue/not bore me, and the bio needs to tell me just enough about the author. I’ll do my best to extract the author’s entire existence from their 2-X-2 inch photo.

Off to the back cover. I’ll be momentarily impressed when I see a blurb by a hot writer like ____, but I know that it is just as likely that I’ll like the book as hate it regardless of these quotes. I look at them in a more voyeuristic way, like a literary gaper’s delay: Wow, the author knows So and So. Bet they send each other clever text messages. Really the only thing I can gauge from the blurbs is my own pathetic jealousy level.

To get a true sense of the book, I have to spend a minute inside. I’ll glance at the first couple pages, then flip to the middle, see if the language matches me somehow. It’s like dating, only with sentences. Some sentences, no matter how well-dressed or nice, just don’t do it for me. Others I click with instantly. It could be something as simple yet weirdly potent as a single word choice (tangerine). We’re meant to be, that sentence and me. And when it happens, you just know.]]>
240 Amy Krouse Rosenthal 1400080460 Nidhi 0 3.95 2005 Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
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<![CDATA[Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal: Not Exactly a Memoir]]> 27833861 Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life returns with a literary experience that is unprecedented, unforgettable, and explosively human.

In the ten years since the publication of her beloved, groundbreaking Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, #1 New York Times bestselling author Amy Krouse Rosenthal has been quietly tinkering away. Using her distinct blend of nonlinear narrative, wistful reflections, and insightful wit, she has created a modest but mighty new work.

Why the title T​extbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal?​

• Because the book is organized into chapters with classic subject headings such as Social Studies, Music, Language Arts, Math, etc.

• Because textbook ​is an expression meaning “quintessential,” as in, Oh, that wordplay and unconventional format is so typical of her, so textbook Amy.

• Because for the first time ever, readers can further engage with a book via text messaging.

• Because if an author’s previous book has E​ncyclopedia i​n the title, following it up with a ​Textbook would be rather nice.

Not exactly a memoir, not just a collection of observations, Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal is an exploration into the many ways we are connected on this planet and speaks to the awe, bewilderment, and poignancy of being alive.]]>
336 Amy Krouse Rosenthal 1101984546 Nidhi 0 4.18 2016 Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal: Not Exactly a Memoir
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The Goldfinch 17333223
Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.]]>
771 Donna Tartt 0316055433 Nidhi 0 3.94 2013 The Goldfinch
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<![CDATA[Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close]]> 4588
The key belonged to his father, he's sure of that. But which of New York's 162 million locks does it open?

So begins a quest that takes Oskar - inventor, letter-writer and amateur detective - across New York's five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives, and complete strangers. He gets heavy boots, he gives himself little bruises and he inches ever nearer to the heart of a family mystery that stretches back fifty years. But will it take him any closer to, or further from, his lost father?]]>
326 Jonathan Safran Foer 0618711651 Nidhi 0 3.98 2005 Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
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Franny and Zooey 5113 ‘Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much only in a different way.’

First published in The New Yorker as two sequential stories, ‘Franny’ and ‘Zooey’ offer a dual portrait of the two youngest members of J. D. Salinger’s fictional Glass family.

Franny Glass is a pretty, effervescent college student on a date with her intellectually confident boyfriend, Lane. They appear to be the perfect couple, but as they struggle to communicate with each other about the things they really care about, slowly their true feelings come to the surface. The second story in this book, ‘Zooey’, plunges us into the world of her ethereal, sophisticated family. When Franny’s emotional and spiritual doubts reach new heights, her older brother Zooey, a misanthropic former child genius, offers her consolation and brotherly advice.

Written in Salinger’s typically irreverent style, these two stories offer a touching snapshot of the distraught mindset of early adulthood and are full of the insightful emotional observations and witty turns of phrase that have helped make Salinger’s reputation what it is today.]]>
201 J.D. Salinger 0316769029 Nidhi 0 3.97 1957 Franny and Zooey
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Love & Misadventure 18003300
Beautifully illustrated and thoughtfully conceived, Love and Misadventure will take you on a roller-coaster ride through an ill-fated love affair—from the initial butterflies to the soaring heights—through to the devastating plunge. Lang Leav has an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers. Her talent for translating complex emotions with astonishing simplicity has won her a cult following of devoted fans from all over the world.]]>
176 Lang Leav 0473235501 Nidhi 0 3.94 2013 Love & Misadventure
author: Lang Leav
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.94
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<![CDATA[The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)]]> 20443235 Some kisses come at a price.

War has begun. Arin is in the thick of it with untrustworthy new allies and the empire as his enemy. Though he has convinced himself that he no longer loves Kestrel, Arin hasn’t forgotten her, or how she became exactly the kind of person he has always despised. She cared more for the empire than she did for the lives of innocent people—and certainly more than she did for him.

At least, that’s what he thinks.

In the frozen north, Kestrel is a prisoner in a brutal work camp. As she searches desperately for a way to escape, she wishes Arin could know what she sacrificed for him. She wishes she could make the empire pay for what they’ve done to her.

But no one gets what they want just by wishing.

As the war intensifies, both Kestrel and Arin discover that the world is changing. The East is pitted against the West, and they are caught in between. With so much to lose, can anybody really win?]]>
486 Marie Rutkoski 0374384738 Nidhi 0 4.19 2016 The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)
author: Marie Rutkoski
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.19
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<![CDATA[The Winner's Crime (The Winner's Trilogy, #2)]]> 20443207
The engagement of Lady Kestrel to Valoria’s crown prince means one celebration after another. But to Kestrel it means living in a cage of her own making. As the wedding approaches, she aches to tell Arin the truth about her engagement... if she could only trust him. Yet can she even trust herself? For—unknown to Arin—Kestrel is becoming a skilled practitioner of deceit: an anonymous spy passing information to Herran, and close to uncovering a shocking secret.

As Arin enlists dangerous allies in the struggle to keep his country’s freedom, he can’t fight the suspicion that Kestrel knows more than she shows. In the end, it might not be a dagger in the dark that cuts him open, but the truth. And when that happens, Kestrel and Arin learn just how much their crimes will cost them.]]>
416 Marie Rutkoski 0374384711 Nidhi 0 4.08 2015 The Winner's Crime (The Winner's Trilogy, #2)
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average rating: 4.08
book published: 2015
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<![CDATA[Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)]]> 22299763
Kaz Brekker and his crew of deadly outcasts have just pulled off a heist so daring even they didn't think they'd survive. But instead of divvying up a fat reward, they're right back to fighting for their lives.

Double-crossed and badly weakened, the crew is low on resources, allies, and hope. As powerful forces from around the world descend on Ketterdam to root out the secrets of the dangerous drug known as jurda parem, old rivals and new enemies emerge to challenge Kaz's cunning and test the team's fragile loyalties.

A war will be waged on the city's dark and twisting streets - a battle for revenge and redemption that will decide the fate of the Grisha world.]]>
561 Leigh Bardugo Nidhi 0 4.58 2016 Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows, #2)
author: Leigh Bardugo
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average rating: 4.58
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<![CDATA[Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)]]> 23437156 Alternate cover of ISBN 9781627792127

Ketterdam: a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price—and no one knows that better than criminal prodigy Kaz Brekker. Kaz is offered a chance at a deadly heist that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. But he can’t pull it off alone...

A convict with a thirst for revenge

A sharpshooter who can’t walk away from a wager

A runaway with a privileged past

A spy known as the Wraith

A Heartrender using her magic to survive the slums

A thief with a gift for unlikely escapes

Six dangerous outcasts. One impossible heist. Kaz’s crew is the only thing that might stand between the world and destruction—if they don’t kill each other first.]]>
480 Leigh Bardugo 1627792120 Nidhi 0 4.47 2015 Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)
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<![CDATA[Ruin and Rising (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #3)]]> 14061957 Alternative Cover Edition #1

The capital has fallen.

The Darkling rules Ravka from his shadow throne.

Now the nation's fate rests with a broken Sun Summoner, a disgraced tracker, and the shattered remnants of a once-great magical army.

Deep in an ancient network of tunnels and caverns, a weakened Alina must submit to the dubious protection of the Apparat and the zealots who worship her as a Saint. Yet her plans lie elsewhere, with the hunt for the elusive firebird and the hope that an outlaw prince still survives.

Alina will have to forge new alliances and put aside old rivalries as she and Mal race to find the last of Morozova's amplifiers. But as she begins to unravel the Darkling's secrets, she reveals a past that will forever alter her understanding of the bond they share and the power she wields. The firebird is the one thing that stands between Ravka and destruction—and claiming it could cost Alina the very future she’s fighting for.]]>
350 Leigh Bardugo Nidhi 0 3.97 2014 Ruin and Rising (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #3)
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<![CDATA[Siege and Storm (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #2)]]> 14061955 Alternative Cover Edition #1

Darkness never dies.

Hunted across the True Sea, haunted by the lives she took on the Fold, Alina must try to make a life with Mal in an unfamiliar land, all while keeping her identity as the Sun Summoner a secret. But she can’t outrun her past or her destiny for long.

The Darkling has emerged from the Shadow Fold with a terrifying new power and a dangerous plan that will test the very boundaries of the natural world. With the help of a notorious privateer, Alina returns to the country she abandoned, determined to fight the forces gathering against Ravka. But as her power grows, Alina slips deeper into the Darkling’s game of forbidden magic, and farther away from Mal. Somehow, she will have to choose between her country, her power, and the love she always thought would guide her—or risk losing everything to the oncoming storm.]]>
435 Leigh Bardugo Nidhi 0 3.81 2013 Siege and Storm (The Shadow and Bone Trilogy, #2)
author: Leigh Bardugo
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average rating: 3.81
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<![CDATA[Shadow and Bone (Shadow and Bone, #1)]]> 10194157 Alternative Cover Edition #1

Surrounded by enemies, the once-great nation of Ravka has been torn in two by the Shadow Fold, a swath of near impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters who feast on human flesh. Now its fate may rest on the shoulders of one lonely refugee.

Alina Starkov has never been good at anything. But when her regiment is attacked on the Fold and her best friend is brutally injured, Alina reveals a dormant power that saves his life—a power that could be the key to setting her war-ravaged country free. Wrenched from everything she knows, Alina is whisked away to the royal court to be trained as a member of the Grisha, the magical elite led by the mysterious Darkling.

Yet nothing in this lavish world is what it seems. With darkness looming and an entire kingdom depending on her untamed power, Alina will have to confront the secrets of the Grisha . . . and the secrets of her heart.]]>
358 Leigh Bardugo 1250048117 Nidhi 0 3.93 2012 Shadow and Bone (Shadow and Bone, #1)
author: Leigh Bardugo
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at: 2016/12/20
date added: 2022/12/19
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Looking for Alaska 99561 Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . .
After. Nothing is ever the same.]]>
221 John Green 1435249151 Nidhi 0 3.97 2005 Looking for Alaska
author: John Green
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/19
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An Abundance of Katherines 49750 Katherine X just wanted to be friends
Katherine XVIII dumped him in an e-mail
K-19 broke his heart

When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton's type happens to be girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact.

On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy-loving best friend riding shotgun--but no Katherines. Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl.

Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.]]>
229 John Green 0525476881 Nidhi 0 3.54 2006 An Abundance of Katherines
author: John Green
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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Paper Towns 6442769 Who is the real Margo?

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew...]]>
305 John Green 014241493X Nidhi 0 3.68 2008 Paper Towns
author: John Green
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2008
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/19
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This Adventure Ends 27779275
Sloane becomes closest to Vera, a social-media star who lights up any room, and Gabe, Vera's twin brother and the most serious person Sloane's ever met. When a beloved painting by the twins' late mother goes missing, Sloane takes on the responsibility of tracking it down, a journey that takes her across state lines—and ever deeper into the twins' lives.

Filled with intense and important friendships, a wonderful warts-and-all family, shiveringly good romantic developments, and sharp, witty dialogue, this story is about finding the people you never knew you needed.]]>
320 Emma Mills 1627799354 Nidhi 0 4.06 2016 This Adventure Ends
author: Emma Mills
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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The Fault in Our Stars 11870085
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green's most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.]]>
313 John Green Nidhi 0 4.13 2012 The Fault in Our Stars
author: John Green
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2012
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/12/19
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<![CDATA[Persepolis. The story of a childhood (Persepolis, #1)]]> 9516
Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran and of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life. Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family. Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, with laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. And, finally, it introduces us to an irresistible little girl with whom we cannot help but fall in love.]]>
153 Marjane Satrapi 037571457X Nidhi 0 4.27 2003 Persepolis. The story of a childhood (Persepolis, #1)
author: Marjane Satrapi
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2003
rating: 0
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Lord of the Flies 7624 182 William Golding 0140283331 Nidhi 0 3.70 1954 Lord of the Flies
author: William Golding
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1954
rating: 0
read at: 2015/12/20
date added: 2022/12/19
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Dune (Dune, #1) 44767458
When House Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined. And as he evolves into the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib, he will bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.]]>
658 Frank Herbert 059309932X Nidhi 0 4.33 1965 Dune (Dune, #1)
author: Frank Herbert
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1965
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/09/04
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The Idiot 30962053 A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.]]>
423 Elif Batuman 1594205612 Nidhi 0 3.67 2017 The Idiot
author: Elif Batuman
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2017
rating: 0
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<![CDATA[Little Women (Little Women, #1)]]> 1934 This is an alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780451529305.

Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

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449 Louisa May Alcott Nidhi 4 4.16 1868 Little Women (Little Women, #1)
author: Louisa May Alcott
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1868
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/01/25
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The Great Gatsby 4671 The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald’s family and from his lifelong publisher.

This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author’s own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.]]>
180 F. Scott Fitzgerald 0743273567 Nidhi 4 3.93 1925 The Great Gatsby
author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1925
rating: 4
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The Bane Chronicles 16303287
This collection of eleven short stories illuminates the life of the enigmatic Magnus Bane, whose alluring personality, flamboyant style, and sharp wit populate the pages of the #1 New York Times bestselling series, The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices.

Originally released one-by-one as e-only short stories by Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson, and Sarah Rees Brennan, this compilation presents all ten together in print for the first time and includes a never-before-seen eleventh tale, as well as new illustrated material.]]>
507 Cassandra Clare 1442495995 Nidhi 4 4.09 2014 The Bane Chronicles
author: Cassandra Clare
name: Nidhi
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2014
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/01/25
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Enclave (Razorland, #1) 7137327
Ann Aguirre's thrilling young adult novel is the story of two young people in an apocalyptic world--facing dangers, and feelings, unlike any they've ever known.]]>
259 Ann Aguirre 0312650086 Nidhi 3 3.91 2011 Enclave (Razorland, #1)
author: Ann Aguirre
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2011
rating: 3
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date added: 2014/01/25
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<![CDATA[Eragon (The Inheritance Cycle #1)]]> 113436 An alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780375826696 can be found here.

One boy...
One dragon...
A world of adventure.

When Eragon finds a polished blue stone in the forest, he thinks it is the lucky discovery of a poor farm boy; perhaps it will buy his family meat for the winter. But when the stone brings a dragon hatchling, Eragon soon realizes he has stumbled upon a legacy nearly as old as the Empire itself.

Overnight his simple life is shattered, and he is thrust into a perilous new world of destiny, magic, and power. With only an ancient sword and the advice of an old storyteller for guidance, Eragon and the fledgling dragon must navigate the dangerous terrain and dark enemies of an Empire ruled by a king whose evil knows no bounds.

Can Eragon take up the mantle of the legendary Dragon Riders? The fate of the Empire may rest in his hands.]]>
503 Christopher Paolini 0375826696 Nidhi 4 3.96 2002 Eragon (The Inheritance Cycle #1)
author: Christopher Paolini
name: Nidhi
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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date added: 2014/01/25
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