Recommendations based on "Virgin Suicides"

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTSHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEBrace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement—and a great gift for its readers.When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered...if indeed there were crimes.The youngest of forty--a child with no name and no past--she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden--in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights--she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.Then everything changes...and nothing changes.A young woman who has never known men--a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints--must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been...and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom. A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered...if indeed there were crimes.The youngest of forty--a child with no name and no past--she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden--in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights--she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.Then everything changes...and nothing changes.A young woman who has never known men--a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints--must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been...and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.

Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The Secret History, which has become a contemporary classic.Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.From the Trade Paperback edition.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING PHENOMENON—NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!More than 18 million copies sold worldwideA Reese’s Book Club PickA Business Insider Defining Book of the Decade“I can't even express how much I love this book! I didn't want this story to end!”—Reese Witherspoon“Painfully beautiful.”—The New York Times Book ReviewFor years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life—until the unthinkable happens.Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this "extraordinary" and beloved Pulitzer Prize winner from the author of The Secret History that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review).Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community.As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love — and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).

this is the first twilight Saga book. the story about a vampire/Human romance

By #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black, the first book in a stunning new series about a mortal girl who finds herself caught in a web of royal faerie intrigue.This Barnes & Noble exclusive edition features a special jacket and bonus story starring fan-favorites Kaye and Roiben of the bestselling Tithe series, allowing readers to witness the pivotal coronation scene from an alternate point of view.Of course I want to be like them. They're beautiful as blades forged in some divine fire. They will live forever.And Cardan is even more beautiful than the rest. I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.Jude was seven years old when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King.To win a place at the Court, she must defy him--and face the consequences.In doing so, she becomes embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, discovering her own capacity for bloodshed. But as civil war threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.

I was supposed to be having the time of my life.When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women's aspirations seriously.The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath's only novel, was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is partially based on Plath's own life and has become a modern classic. The Bell Jar has been celebrated for its darkly funny and a razor sharp portrait of 1950s society and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she`d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen`s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties.Girl, Interruptedis a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A collectible hardcover edition of one of the great American novels—and one of America's most popular—featuring an introduction by Min Jin Lee, the New York Times bestselling author of PachinkoThe basis for the Broadway musical starring Jeremy Jordan and Eva NoblezadaOne of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsA Penguin Vitae EditionYoung, handsome, and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby seems to have everything. But at his mansion east of New York City, in West Egg, Long Island, where the party seems never to end, he's often alone in the glittering Jazz Age crowd, watching and waiting, as speculation swirls around him—that he's a bootlegger, that he was a German spy during the war, that he even killed a man. As writer Nick Carraway is drawn into this decadent orbit, he begins to see beneath the shimmering surface of the enigmatic Gatsby, for whom one thing will always be out of reach: Nick's cousin, the married Daisy Buchanan, whose house is visible from Gatsby's just across the bay.A brilliant evocation of the Roaring Twenties and a satire of a postwar America obsessed with wealth and status, The Great Gatsby is a novel whose power remains undiminished after a century. This edition, based on scholarship dating back to the novel's first publication in 1925, restores Fitzgerald's masterpiece to the original American classic he envisioned, and features an introduction addressing how gender, race, class, and sexuality complicate the pursuit of the American Dream.Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as "Penguin of one's life"—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.