Knut Hamsun's novel The Growth of the Soil won the Norwegian writer a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. English translator W. W. Worster summed up the novel with these words:

"It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands."

"It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its dominant

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"At the center of this story is the Cathedral. Its design and construction in the 13th and 14th centuries in the Rhineland town of Hagenburg unites a vast array of unforgettable characters whose fortunes are inseparable from the shifting political factions and economic interests vying for supremacy. From the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stonecutters, everyone, even the town's Jewish denizens, is implicated and affected by the...

"On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is up rooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia's brother gets pulled into a politically militarized...

"Three Vietnamese American women mourning the death of the family matriarch recount their lives and childhoods at a crumbling, gothic manor called Banyan House, where the secrets of her grandmother's past come to light."-- "When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she's last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life--a beautiful lake house,...

"A beautiful and poignant story of one family during the most violent and turbulent years of world history, Miss Burma is a powerful novel of love and war, colonialism and ethnicity, and the ties of blood. Based on the story of the author's mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be, and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom"--

Through highs and the lows, good times and the bad, life on the fair is unforgettable Julie and Dicky Otterman arrive at Grundy's fair with an extraordinary new act: the motorcycle extravaganza, The Wall of Death. This seemingly happy couple are the talk of the town, but all is not as it seems, and Dicky's dark and violent nature means Julie lives in constant fear. There's always plenty happening at Grundy's fair: Gemma knows Velda's secret. Renata...

"Japan, 1957. Seventeen-year-old Naoko Nakamura's prearranged marriage to the son of her father's business associate would secure her family's status in their traditional Japanese community, but Naoko has fallen for another man--an American sailor, a gaijin--and to marry him would bring great shame upon her entire family. When it's learned Naoko carries the sailor's child, she's cast out in disgrace and forced to make unimaginable choices with consequences...

"When a drunk driver is released after causing an accident that ended her grandson's life, a sassy retired schoolteacher takes up her husband's vigilante campaign to exact justice, much to the chagrin of the smitten local sheriff"--

It's 1994 and Adam, a drug addict from New York City, arrives at a kibbutz in Israel with a medieval sapphire brooch. To make up for a past crime, he needs to get the priceless heirloom to a woman his grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz fifty years earlier. There Adam joins other troubled people trying to turn their lives around: Ulya, the ambitious and beautiful Soviet emigre ; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand...

When Orhan's brilliant and eccentric grandfather, who built a dynasty out of making kilim rugs, is found dead in a vat of dye, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But his grandfather's will raises more questions than it answers. Kemal has left the family estate to a stranger thousands of miles away, an aging woman in a retirement home in Los Angeles. Her existence and secrecy about her past only deepen the mystery of why Orhan's grandfather would...