Recommended Reading

[Jessica]

More from Sara Gruen

Riding Lessons
As a world-class equestrian and Olympic contender, Annemarie Zimmer lived for the thrill of flight atop a strong, graceful animal. Then, at eighteen, a tragic accident destroyed her riding career and Harry, the beautiful horse she cherished. Now, twenty years later, Annemarie is coming home to her dying father's New Hampshire horse farm. Jobless and abandoned, she is bringing her troubled teenage daughter to this place of pain and memory, where ghosts of an unresolved youth still haunt the fields and stables -- and where hope lives in the eyes of the handsome, gentle veterinarian Annemarie loved as a girl ... and in the seductive allure of a trainer with a magic touch.

Flying Changes
Anxiety rules Annemarie Zimmer's days -- the fear that her relationship with the man she loves is growing stagnant; the fear that equestrian daughter Eva's dreams of Olympic glory will carry her far away from her mother and into harm's way. For five months, Annemarie has struggled to make peace with her past. But if she cannot let go, the personal battles she has won and the heights she has achieved will have all been for naught. It is a time of change at Maple Brook horse farm, when loves must be confronted head-on and fears must be saddled and broken.

Additional Recommended Reading

Geek Love
Katherine Dunn
Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out -- with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes -- to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.

A Son of the Circus
John Irving
Born a Parsi in Bombay, sent to university and medical school in Vienna, Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla is a 59-year-old orthopedic surgeon and a Canadian citizen who lives in Toronto. Periodically, the doctor returns to Bombay, where most of his patients are crippled children. Once, 20 years ago, Dr. Daruwalla was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa. Now, 20 years later, he will be reacquainted with the murderer.

Sunset and Sawdust
Joe R. Lansdale
Landsdale's murder mystery is set in a steamy backwater of Depression-era East Texas. It begins with an explosion: Sunset Jones kills her husband with a bullet to the brain. Pete Jones was constable of the small sawmill town of Camp Rapture (“Camp Rupture” to the local blacks), where no woman, least of all Pete's, refuses her husband what he wants. So most everyone is surprised and angry when, Sunset is named the new constable of the mill. And they're even more surprised when she dares to take the job seriously: beginning an investigation into the murder of a woman and an unborn baby. Yet no one is more surprised than Sunset herself when the murders lead her not only to the shocking conclusion of the case, but to a well of inner strength she never knew she had.

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a nearly hopeless situation, they set out for California's Central Valley along with thousands of other "Okies" in search of land, jobs, and dignity. The novel emphasizes the need for cooperative, as opposed to individualistic, solutions to social problems brought about by the mechanization of agriculture and the Dust Bowl drought.

The Time Traveller's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
Henry DeTamble is a dashing, adventuresome librarian who travels involuntarily through time. Clare Abshire is an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare's passionate love affair endures across a sea of time and captures the two lovers in an impossibly romantic trap, and it is Audrey Niffenegger's cinematic storytelling that makes the novel's unconventional chronology so vibrantly triumphant.