Unbridled Books: 96 books

In her first memoir-Immortelles: Memoir of a Will-o’-the-Wisp-Mireille Marokvia described her life growing up in a small village near Chartres, France, in the first decades of the 20th Century. We learned in that beautiful book that the people in her life so long past still live like ghosts in her...

From the moment that he looks down on the ancient gray head of Noah, who is swinging his stone axe, the narrating crow in this unique and remarkable epic knows that these creators called Man are trouble. He senses, too, that the natural order of things is about to change.At a time when so many of us...

Masha Hamilton’s fifth novel, What Changes Everything, is truly an American story, an exploration of our twisted, misguided, generous relationship with an enigmatic country. And it is told by a novelist of extraordinary talent who currently works in Afghanistan.What Changes Everything is the story...

Tears of the Mountain chronicles a single dayin one man's life-July 4, 1876-along with aseries of flashbacks that all lead up to an eventfulCentennial Independence Day celebration inSonoma, California. Over the course of thissurprisingly pivotal moment in his life, JeremiahMcKinley prepares for the celebration...

A woman in New York awakens knowing, as deeply as a mother’s blood can know, that her grown son is in danger. She has not heard from him in weeks. His name is Jonas. His girlfriend, Vic, doesn’t know what she has done wrong, but Jonas won’t answer his cell phone. We soon learn that Jonas is isolated...

Timothy Schaffert has created his most memorable character yet in Essie, an octogenarian obituary writer for her family’s small town newspaper. When a young country girl is reported to be missing, perhaps whisked away by an itinerant aerial photographer, Essie stumbles onto the story of her life. Or,...

In this lithely told and atmospheric story, a fishing village on the Gulf Coast loses its bearings as its shrimping industry begins to fail. The town of Goodnight by the Sea lies on a peninsula between two bays, Red Moon and Humosa, and for years its people, many of them immigrants drawn to this ragged...

As the California borderland newspaper where they work prepares to close, three reporters are oddly given assignments to return to stories they’ve covered before-each one surprisingly personal. The first assignment takes reporter Aaron Klinsman and photographer Rita Valdez to an abandoned motel room...

The Islands of Divine Music is a novel of five generations of an Italian-American family finding its place in the New World. Against a backdrop of Immigration, Prohibition, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the new millennium, five generations of the Verbicaro family make their way from...

Sometimes Bone King cannot go through doors. He has no physical impairment, but at times his brain and muscles simply can’t recall how to walk him through them. Perhaps it has something to do with his being distracted thinking about grammar and etymology all the time, or maybe it’s anxiety that...

When a dust storm engulfs her Colorado town and pink snow blankets the streets, a heartbreaking decision faces Ruby Cole, a girl who counts birds: She must abandon her baby or give in to her father, whom she nicknames Lord God, and marry a man more than twice her age who already has two wives. She chooses...

From the heartlands of the 1880s Upper Midwest comes a morality tale of survival and destiny told in the convincing language of a patriarch’s journal, evoking a real sense of the time and place. Gerhardt Praeger, a farmer of some education and plenty experience, understands the mixture of hard work,...

It’s Super Bowl Sunday at the Almost Home Bar and Grill with the hometown Broncos playing for their second championship in a row, and the already busy night is about to get busier. When the bartender walks off, she leaves the remaining staff to the chaos of the night-and with the real question. Not...

Caddie Blair feels everything strongly-and so she works hard to keep her distance. It’s the ethical thing for a journalist to do, especially in a war-torn region like the Middle East. And Caddie wants to believe that nothing is as important as covering “the story.”There’s room for passion in her...