Star-Crossed Lovers

This National Book Award winner tells the story of John Grady Cole who, at 16, finds himself at the dying end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. (From the catalog summary)

On a summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives and her precocious imagination bring about a crime that will change all their lives, a crime whose repercussions [follow] through the chaos and carnage of World War II and into the close of the twentieth century. (Catalog summary)

Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years. (Catalog summary)

At 45, Adrienne Willis must rethink her life when her husband abandons her for a younger woman. Reeling with heartache, she flees to the small coastal town of Rodanthe to tend to a friend's inn for the weekend where she meets Paul Flanner, who is escaping his own shattered past. (Catalog summary)

What happens when you make a promise to bring back a fallen star? Teenager Tristran Thorn is about to find out, as he ventures beyond the wall of his English countryside town. After falling in love with the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester, he sets out on a quest to fulfill his promise to his beloved-and stumbles into the magical realm that lies beyond. (Catalog summary)

With unsettling beauty and intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions—and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. (Catalog summary)

Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition that casts Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel. (Catalog summary)

Leafing through his newspaper's literary supplement one day, Charles Callahan, a middle-aged insurance broker, spots a photograph of his first love, Sin Richards. Married, faithfully if not happily, with three daughters and a struggling business, Charles writes to Sin, a published poet, also married and mother of two children. Sin writes back, and as their correspondence develops into intimacy, three decades after their childhood affair, they agree to meet again. Swept up in the past and consumed by an obsessive love, Sin and Charles risk everything for each other, reaching across time to reclaim what they had in youth. (Catalog summary)