Butler, Octavia, Parable of the Sower - But, it is 2007 not 2025, "Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Butler's first novel since 1989's Imago offers an uncommonly sensitive rendering of a very common SF scenario: by 2025, global warming, pollution, racial and ethnic tensions and other ills have precipitated a worldwide decline. In the Los Angeles area, small beleaguered communities of the still-employed hide behind makeshift walls from hordes of desperate homeless scavengers and violent pyromaniac addicts known as "paints" who, with water and work growing scarcer, have become increasingly aggressive.

Allison, Dorothy

Bastard Out of Carolina - "Set in the rural South, this tale centers around the Boatwright family, a proud and closeknit clan known for their drinking, fighting, and womanizing" (Library Journal).

Alvarez, Julia

In the Time of Butterflies - "During the last days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, three young women, members of a conservative, pious Catholic family, who had become committed to the revolutionary overthrow of the regime, were ambushed and assassinated as they drove back from visiting their jailed husbands. Thus martyred, the Mirabal sisters have become mythical figures in their country, where they are known as las mariposas (the butterflies), from their underground code names" ( Publishers Weekly).

Atwood, Margaret

The Handmaid's Tale - "In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies? Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read" (Amazon).

Card, Orson Scott

Ender's Game - "Intense is the word for Ender's Game. Aliens have attacked Earth twice and almost destroyed the human species. To make sure humans win the next encounter, the world government has taken to breeding military geniuses -- and then training them in the arts of war... The early training, not surprisingly, takes the form of 'games'... Ender Wiggin is a genius among geniuses; he wins all the games... He is smart enough to know that time is running out. But is he smart enough to save the planet?" (New York Times)

Chopin, Kate

The Awakening - "Shocked readers in 1899 and the scandal created by the book haunted Kate Chopin for the rest of her life. The Awakening begins at a crisis point in twenty-eight year-old Edna Pontellier's life. Edna is a passionate and artistic woman who finds few acceptable outlets for her desires in her role as wife and mother of two sons living in conventional Creole society" (500 Great Books by Women).

Emecheta, Buchi

Bride Price - Born of Ibo parents in Nigeria, Buchi Emecheta is widely known for her multilayered stories of black women struggling to maintain their identity and construct viable lives for themselves and their families.

Frazier, Charles

Cold Mountain - "A Civil War soldier and a lonely woman embark on parallel journeys of danger and discovery. Environment, events, and the empathy of others transform the protagonists spiritually as well as physically" (School Library Journal).

Gaines Ernest J.

A Lesson before Dying

Gaines's NBCC Award-winning novel tells of the relationship forged between a young black man on death row and his teacher in 1940s Louisiana".

Gardner, John

Grendel - "In the Old English epic Beowulf the hero of the title slays Grendel, the half-human monster that nightly came to assault the citadel of the Danish king. When Grendel's even more formidable mother comes to avenge him, Beowulf chases her back to her lair and dispatches her, as well. In 1971 American novelist John Gardner achieved deserved celebrity for retelling these above events from Grendel's point of view" (AudioFile).

Gibbons, Kaye

Ellen Foster - "The appealing, eponymous, 11-year-old orphan heroine of this Southern-focused debut survives appalling situations until she finds safe harbor in a good foster home" (Publishers Weekly).

Heller, Joseph

Catch 22 - "Catch 22 is a gut-wrenching satire which attacks the absurdities in the dehumanizing military bureaucracy of WW II"

(AudioFile).

Huxley, Aldous

Brave New World - "Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is a classic science fiction work that continues to be a significant warning to our society today. Tony Britton, the reader, does an excellent job of portraying clinical detachment as the true nature of the human incubators is revealed. The tone lightens during the vacation to the wilderness and the contrast is even more striking" (Library Journal).

Keneally, Thomas

Schindler's List - "How the German Oskar Schindler came to save more than one thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust is one of the most fascinating stories of the century" (Library Journal).

King, Laurie

The Beekeeper's Apprentice: Or on the Segregation of the Queen - "King has created "a wonderfully original and entertaining story that is funny, heartwarming, and full of intrigue, with Holmes and his young apprentice, Mary Russell, matching wits with some of the finer criminal minds of the times, including the brilliantly diabolic daughter of Holmes' old enemy, Professor Moriarty" (Booklist).

Kosinski, Jerzy

Painted Bird  - "Semiautobiographical novel by Jerzy Kosinski, published in 1965 and revised in 1976. The ordeals of the central character parallel Kosinski's own experiences during World War II. A dark-haired Polish child who is taken for either a Gypsy or a Jew loses his parents in the mayhem of war and wanders through the countryside at the mercy of the brutal, thickheaded peasants he meets in the villages" (Merriam Webster).

LeGuin, Ursula

The Left Hand of Darkness - One for the sophisticated reader of the sci-fi genre, " Ursula K. Le Guin's award-winning, groundbreaking science fiction classic takes us to the world of Winter, and introduces us to its inhabitants, the Gethenians-whose society is not based on gender roles" (Amazon).

Malamud, Bernard

The Fixer - "Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society" (Amazon).

Markandaya, Kamala

Nectar in a Sieve -  " Rukmani, a peasant from a village in India, lives a life of constant struggle, yet she is a source of strength for many. At age twelve she marries a man she has never met and moves with him to his rented farmland" (500 Hundred Great Books by Women).

Mason, Bobbie Ann

In Country - "Sam, 17, is obsessed with the Vietnam War and the effect it has had on her lifelosing a father she never knew and now living with Uncle Emmett, who seems to be suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. In her own forthright way, she tries to sort out why and how Vietnam has altered the lives of the vets of Hopewell, Kentucky" (School Library Journal).

McCullers, Carson

The Member of the Wedding -"In The Member of the Wedding , Frankie Adams is hungry for escape, hungry for belonging; it is her peculiar resolution to this classic adolescent paradox that makes her unique. Frankie finds a new identity in her determination to become an integral part of her brother's wedding" (500 Great Books for Women).

McKinley, Robin

Beauty - "This much-loved retelling of the classic French tale Beauty and the Beast elicits the familiar magical charm, but is more believable and complex than the traditional story. In this version, Beauty is not as beautiful as her older sisters, who are both lovely and kind. Here, in fact, Beauty has no confidence in her appearance but takes pride in her own intelligence, her love of learning and books, and her talent in riding" (Amazon).

Mori, Kyoko

Shizuko's Daughter - "Shizuko kills herself, escaping a soured marriage, leaving her husband free to marry his mistress of eight years, and having vague ideas about making her daughter's life better. Yuki, 12, now faces a bleak world with a stepmother who tries to eradicate all traces of her predecessor and curtail the girl's visits to her mother's family" (School Library Journal).

O'Brien, Tim

The Things They Carried - "Each of the 22 tales relates the exploits and personalities of a fictional platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam. An acutely painful reading experience, this collection should be read as a book and not a mere selection of stories reprinted from magazines" (Library Journal).

O'Connor, Flannery

Everything That Rises Must Converge - "This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else" (Amazon).

Potok, Chaim

The Chosen - " It is the now-classic story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever considered before" (Amazon).

Power, Susan

The Grass Dancer - "Rich in myth and legend, this powerful story of the Dakota Indians flows seamlessly back and forth in time from 1864-1982. In the mid-1860s, a young Sioux maiden, Red Dress, translates the sermons of Father La Frambois but deliberately misinterprets the Jesuit's message, through which he hoped to convert her tribe" (School Library Journal).

Uchida, Yoshiko

Picture Bride - " Carrying a photograph of the man she is to marry but has yet to meet, young Hana Omiya arrives in San Francisco, California, in 1917, one of several hundred Japanese "picture brides" whose arranged marriages brought them to America in the early 1900s" (Barnes & Noble).

Watson, Larry

Montana 1948 - "A young Sioux woman tossing with fever on a cot; a father begging his wife for help; a mother standing uncertainly in her kitchen with a 12-gauge shotgun: from these fragments of memory, evoked by the narrator as the novel opens, Watson builds a simple but powerful tale. It is Montana in 1948, and young David Hayden's father, Wesley, is sheriff of their small town--a position he inherited from his domineering father" (Library Journal).