Pam Conrad

Prairie Songs ( 167 pages ) - Hardcover
Condition : OK, yellowish pages
Price : RM10

Synopsis :
he Nebraska prairie was a barren place that offered beauty and peace to some, loneliness and madness to others. Prairie Songs provides a beautifully written insight into this contrast. Louisa and her shy brother Lester live quite contentedly with their parents when the new doctor arrives with his beautiful and fragile pregnant wife, Emmeline. All work to help the new couple adjust to harsh weather, buffalo chips, soddies and Indians; Emmeline agrees to teach the children some reading. After a terrible fright, she goes into premature labor; her baby is stillborn, and Emmeline is reduced to madness. The children notice Emmeline's loneliness and growing madness with sadness, but they accept prairie life for what it is. Conrad artfully deals with all the harsh facts in this fast-paced novel which leaves readers with a real feeling for the difficulties of pioneer life. *http://www.amazon.com/*

Barbara Kingsolver

Pigs in Heaven - Hardcover (343 pages)
Condition : Yellowish pages
Price : RM10

Synopsis :
When a young Cherokee tribal lawyer comes to the door to claim Taylor's illegally adopted Indian daughter, the white woman must face the fact that her stable life is about to be torn apart. The story follows her and six-year-old Turtle across the West as they flee from the threat of separation and exist on minimum-wage earnings. Meanwhile, Taylor's mother, Alice, leaves her second husband and goes to stay with her cousin in Heaven, Oklahoma. There she meets Cash, a full-blooded Cherokee, who has been living outside the reservation, but yearns to return to his roots. The richness of Indian tribal life is seen through the eyes of Cash, Alice, and Annawake Fourkiller, the lawyer. There are some wonderful scenes revealing Cherokee customs and lifestyles. The stories of the different characters are woven together with humor and sensitivity. When Taylor and Turtle come to the reservation to face their future, readers will feel the adoptive mother's helplessness as she admits that she, too, might have let the child down. The characters are ordinary, yet noble and memorable, and the ending is just and gratifying. The issue of Indian children being adopted outside the tribe is addressed with respect from all sides. *amazon.com*

Jess Walter

Citizen Vince (293 pages)
Condition : Very good
Price : RM 10

Synopsis :
The highly acclaimed author of Over Tumbled Graves and Land Of The Blind delivers another deft and dazzling suspense novel, a tale of petty crime, local politics, and murder set in 1980, featuring Alan Dupree as a fresh young investigator not yet disillusioned by the job. Small-time East Coast criminal Vince Camden was relocated to Spokane under the Witness protection program after serving up a couple of his old buddies to the Feds. In his seedy suburban tract house Vince wakes up every morning at 1.59AM before his alarm goes off, and starts counting all the dead people he knows. On this particular day, Vince feels more paranoid than ever that someone's out to get him. The people he encounters are jittery and out of sorts. But the real games begin when his walk home takes him across the path of detective Dupree at the scene of a grisly shooting. *http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk*