Showing results for "Liberty" in Literary Fiction

Lake Wobegon is in a frenzy of preparations for the Fourth of July. The town is dizzy with anticipation - until they hear of Clint's ambition to run for Congress. They know about his episodes with vodka sours, his rocky marriage, and his friendship with the 24-year-old who dresses up as the Statue of Liberty for the parade and may be buck naked beneath her robes. In Keillor's words, "It is Lake Wobegon as you imagined it - good loving people who drive each other crazy."

Single mum, Holly Wilson, and her twenty-year-old son Harry have an enviably close relationship but when Harry finds out that she is pregnant and, for reasons unknown to all but herself, intends to raise the baby alone again, he begins to question her decision not to tell him about his own father, who abandoned them before his birth. Upon discovering his father’s name, Harry secretly embarks on his search for the truth, a search which takes him to Los Angeles where he uncovers a tragic story.

After Angeline Lalande, a journalist and historian, unearths the real meaning of the name Azyl, conferred on the town in the 1800s by immigrant-hating politicians, the town elders begin the act of renaming it. During the course of the renaming, we meet the intriguing denizens of the town -survivors, strugglers, and strivers of every race and nationality, and see the intersection of their lives and the ways they find home, heaven, and haven in each other.

Ross Egan has quietly labored for years in the West African nation of Dutannuru, a tiny republican democracy that emerged from the wreckage of the brutal civil war that claimed the brilliant engineer's wife and child. Then Egan is abruptly thrust onto the world stage at the center of the deadly international crisis. His actions and resulting notoriety land him on the short list of individuals capable of challenging the US presidential incumbent, seen by some as the most dangerously leftist president ever.

Learn about the bomb blast that rocked the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, killing four young girls.

Inhabiting four lives - a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption - this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive - as much through love as blood.