Little Women
The lives and adventures of the four March sisters--Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy--are set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century New England while their father is off fighting in the Civil War.
--Louisa May Alcott

The Good Earth
Life in China before the vast political and social upheavals transformed an agrarian country into a world power. Buck traces the whole cycle of life--its terrors, its passions, its ambitions, and rewards.
--Pearl S. Buck

The House on Mango Street
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and run-down tenements, and she tries to rise above the hopelessness.
--Sandra Cisneros

Silas Marner
Though he started life as a religious man, a heartbreaking betrayal drove Silas Marner to become a miserly recluse. But one day, his gold is stolen and a golden-haired girl appears in his cottage.
--George Elliott

A Raisin in the Sun
A black family is united in love and pride as they struggle to overcome poverty and harsh living conditions in the 1959 play about an embattled Chicago family.
--Lorraine Hansberry

Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Compiled by her sister after the poet's death and originally published in 1956, this is the definitive edition of Millay, right up through her last poem, Mine the Harvest.

Gone With the Wind
The life and loves of the beautiful and selfish Scarlett O'Hara. The story begins on her Georgia plantation  in antebellem days and moves through the Civil War and Reconstruction.
--Margaret Mitchell

The Scarlet Pimpernel
In revolutionary France, the evil Head of Secret Police, Chauvelin, keeps the guillotines busy . Only a mysterious stranger constantly foils Chauvelin's plans with his heroic missions to save innocent lives.
--Baroness Orczy

Ship of Fools
It is the summer of 1931, on board a cruise ship bound for Bremerhaven, Germany. The passenger list is long and portentous.  Out of the intense experience, everyone emerges forever changed.
--Katherine Anne Porter

The God of Small Things
The tragic decline of an Indian family suffering the terrible consequences of forbidden love uncoils with a sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it.
--Arundhati Roy

Frankenstein 
The world's most famous monster comes to life in this 1818 novel, a tale that combines Gothic romance and science fiction to tell of a young doctor's attempts to breath life into an artificial man.
--Mary Shelley

Uncle Tom's Cabin
This timeless classic of slavery and survival in the Old South comes alive in this moving tribute to the strength of the human spirit.
--Harriet Beecher Stowe

Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart
At fifty-seven, Kate leaves her lover to embark on a new excursion and encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, emerging at a place where nothing remains but love.
--Alice Walker

Orlando
In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel, Woolf has created a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex.
--Virginia Woolf