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1) Empire Falls
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The bestselling author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace.
“Rich, humorous ... Mr. Russo’s most seductive book thus far.” —The New York Times
Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned...
“Rich, humorous ... Mr. Russo’s most seductive book thus far.” —The New York Times
Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned...
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"At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams--breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest, attending a university, and becoming a writer--were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, working days and taking college classes online. She also began to write relentlessly. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans....
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From the author of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, his dramatic masterpiece on the complex relationships within a working-class family.
Gertrude Morel married beneath her status and now loathes her drunken, working-class husband. She instead focuses her passion on her son, Paul, who returns her love and equally despises his father. As Paul matures into a young artist, this relationship strains his attempts at connecting with other
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"Mike Muñoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it"--
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Nine classic short stories portraying the isolation, criminality, morality, and rebellion of the working class from award-winning, bestselling author Alan Sillitoe The titular story follows the internal decisions and external oppressions of a seventeen-year-old inmate in a juvenile detention center who is known only by his surname, Smith. The wardens have given the boy a light workload because he shows talent as a runner. But if he wins the national...
6) Mary Barton
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When John Barton's wife dies, he is forced to raise his daughter, Mary, alone, while he grieves the love of his life. Though he is a hard-working man, John struggles to provide for his family. Realizing how unfair his financial situation is, John becomes very resentful towards the unethical distribution of wealth between the social classes. Against John's wishes, when Mary comes of age, she decides to help support their family by working in a dressmaking...
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After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her story tackles the difficult, poignant, and fascinating family accounts of her paternal grandfather's shellshock; her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during WWII;...
8) Joe: a novel
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The lives of two men--Joe Ransom, a drinking, gambling, reckless fifty-year-old, and Gary Jones, a luckless fifteen-year-old raised by an evil father and an insane mother--become intertwined in a novel of good, evil, temptation, and sacrifice.
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"Orphans Gig and Rye Dolan don't have a penny to their names. The brothers work grueling, odd jobs each day just to secure a meal, and spend nights sleeping wherever they can with other day laborers. Twenty-three-year-old Gig is a passionate union man, fighting for fair pay and calling out the corrupt employers who exploit the working class. Eager to emulate his older brother, Rye follows suit, though he can't quite muster Gig's passion for the cause....
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What You Have Left is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and, most of all, longing.
In 1976, on the day of his wife's funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again -- "time I spent wondering what I'd done to make him leave," she...
11) Incendiary
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Distraught over the deaths of her husband and son in a suicide bombing at a London soccer match, a woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden to persuade him to abandon his terror campaign.
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Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...
13) The jungle
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A documentary novel portraying industry's conditions at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Sinclair's novel prompted public outrage which led President Theodore Roosevelt to demand an official investigation. This eventually led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug laws.
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"Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than bluegrass music, tobacco fields, and a...
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"A dynamic historian revisits the workers' internationals, whose scope and significance are commonly overlooked. In current debates about globalization, open and borderless elites are often set in opposition to the immobile and protectionist working classes. This view obscures a major historical fact: for around a century-from the 1860s to the 1970s-worker movements were at the cutting edge of internationalism. The creation in London of the International...
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Alan Sillitoe's bestselling debut novel about debauchery, infidelity . . . and the morning after Arthur Seaton, a ladies' man and factory-worker extraordinaire, has just downed seven gins and eleven pints at his local pub. Thoroughly smashed, he proceeds to tumble down an entire flight of stairs, pass out, and wake up again only to vomit on a middle-aged couple. Luckily Arthur's lover, Brenda-a married woman with two kids-lets Arthur escape to her...
17) Shuggie Bain
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English
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"Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's war on heavy industry has put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for his artistic brother and practical sister. She dreams of...
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"Niamh Ó Conchobhair has never let herself long for more. The magic in her blood that lets her stitch emotions and memories into fabric is the same magic that will eventually kill her. Determined to spend the little time she has left guaranteeing a better life for her family, Niamh jumps at the chance to design the wardrobe for a royal wedding in the neighboring kingdom of Avaland. But Avaland is far from the fairytale that she imagined. While young...
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With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from...
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