This is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.

In 1867, Lisa See’s great-great-grandfather arrived in America, and Lisa herself grew up playing in her family’s antiques store in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Out of these stories and years of research she has constructed a sweeping chronicle of a Chinese-Amercian family on “Gold Mountain,” the Chinese name for the United States.

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his school in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum.

Nate Shaw’s father was born under slavery. This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four year old Shaw’s oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of an ‘”over-average” man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people – and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about. All God's Dangers won the National Book Award in 1975.

As the Chinese and the army of the North sweep south during the Korean War, an old peasant farmer and his wife flee their village across the bleak, bombed-out landscape. They soon come upon a boy in a ditch who is wounded and unconscious. Stirred by possessiveness and caring the woman refuses to leave the boy behind. The man thinks she is crazy to nurse this boy, to risk their lives for some dying stranger. Angry and bewildered, he waits for the boy to die. And when the boy does not die, the old man begins to believe that the boy possesses a magic upon which all their lives depend....