William J. Bernstein promises to lay out an investment strategy that any seven year old could understand and will take just 15 minutes of work per year. He also promises it will beat 90% of finance professionals in the long run, but still make you a millionaire over time. Bernstein is addressing young Americans just embarking on their working careers. Bernstein advocates saving 15% of one's salary starting no later than age 25 into tax-sheltered savings plans (IRA or 401(k) in the U.S., RRSPs or Registered Pension Plans in Canada), and divvying up the money into just three mutual funds: a U.S.... continue
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Sethe works at beating back the pas... continue
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held toge... continue
Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable ta... continue
"[This] unflinching, incendiary debut combines the espionage novels of John le Carré with the racial complexity of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) What if your sense of duty required you to betray the man you love? It's 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She's brilliant, but she's also a young black woman working in an old boys' club. Her career has stalled out, she's overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she's given the opportunity to join... continue
A musical, magical, resilient volume from the first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States. In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River. Stomp dance songs, blues, and jazz ballads echo throughout. Lost ancestors are recalled. Resilient songs are born, even as they grieve the loss of their country. Called a "magician an... continue
Dara Barr, documentary filmmaker, is at the top of her game. She's covered neo-Nazis and post-Katrina New Orleans, but now she's looking for an even bigger challenge. So Dara and her right-hand man Xavier head to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, to tackle modern-day pirates. But they soon find a whole lot more than they bargained for and quickly learn that almost no one in Djibouti is what he seems. A mob of colourful characters patrols the seas, including a pirate chief with a taste for fine cars and an Oxford-educated sheik with scams of his own. And then there's the gun-toting Texan billion... continue
“A stunning historical saga of hardship and desire in wartime. . . . Readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough [in this] . . . unique take on the traditional World War 2 tale.” —Library Journal From bestselling and eight-time Christy Award–winning author Lynn Austin comes a remarkable novel of sisterhood, self-discovery, and romance set against the backdrop of WW2. 1950. In the wake of the war, Audrey Clarkson leaves her manor house in England for a fresh start in America with her young son. As a widowed war bride, Audrey needs the support of her American in-laws, whom she has never ... continue
NATIONAL BEST SELLER • Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection. • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it al... continue
WINNER OF THE BBC SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2010 A spectacularly revealing and harrowing portrait of ordinary lives in the world's least ordinary country, North Korea North Korea is Orwell's 1984 made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. After the death of the country's great leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, famine descended, and Nothing to Envy - winner of the 2010 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction - weaves together ... continue