TheBestseller
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Best Sellers

Hardcover Fiction

Week of May 9, 1999

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THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON
Stephen King
Cover of THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON

THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON

by Stephen King · Scribner

3 wks on list

When Trisha McFarland gets lost in the woods of Maine she imagines her hero, relief pitcher Tom Gordon, is with her and will help her survive against the beast trying to kill her.

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A NEW SONG
Jan Karon
Cover of A NEW SONG

A NEW SONG

by Jan Karon · Viking Press

3 wks on list

In A New Song, Mitford's longtime Episcopal priest, Father Tim, retires. However, new challenges and adventures await when he agrees to serve as interim minister of a small church on Whitecap Island. He and his wife, Cynthia, soon find that Whitecap has its own unforgettable characters: a church organist with a mysterious past, a lovelorn bachelor placing personal ads, a mother battling paralyzing depression. They also find that Mitford is never far away when circumstances "back home" keep their phone ringing off the hook. In this fifth novel of the beloved series, fans old and new will discover that a trip to Mitford and Whitecap is twice as good for the soul.

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THE TESTAMENT
John Grisham
Cover of THE TESTAMENT

THE TESTAMENT

by John Grisham · Doubleday

12 wks on list

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In a plush Virginia office, a rich, angry old man is furiously rewriting his will. With his death just hours away, Troy Phelan wants to send a message to his children, his ex-wives, and his minions—a message that will touch off a vicious legal battle and transform dozens of lives. Nate O'Riley is a high-octane Washington litigator who's lived too hard, too fast, for too long. His second marriage in a shambles, and he is emerging from his fourth stay in rehab armed with little more than his fragile sobriety, good intentions, and resilient sense of humor. Returning to the real world is always difficult, but this time it's going to be murder. Rachel Lane is a young woman who chose to give her life to God, who walked away from the modern world with all its strivings and trappings and encumbrances, and went to live and work with a primitive tribe of Indians in the deepest jungles of Brazil. In a story that mixes legal suspense with a remarkable adventure, their lives are forever altered by the startling secret of The Testament. Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!

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EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS
David Guterson
Cover of EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS

EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS

by David Guterson · Harcourt Brace

1 wks on list

When Dr Ben Givens left his Seattle home he never intended to return. It was to be a journey past snow-covered mountains to a place of canyons, sagelands and orchards, where, on the verges of the Columbia River, Ben had entered the world and would now take his leave of it.

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SOUL OF THE FIRE
Terry Goodkind
Cover of SOUL OF THE FIRE

SOUL OF THE FIRE

by Terry Goodkind · Tor/Doherty

2 wks on list

Terry Goodkind returns to the epic Sword of Truth saga in a tale of sweeping fantasy adventure bound to enthrall his growing legion of fans. In Temple of the Winds, the New York Times bestselling fourth novel in the series, the Seeker of Truth Richard Rahl and Mother Confessor Kahlan Amnell risked their lives and souls to free the land of D'Hara from the scourge of a magical plague. But in doing so they accidentally unleashed the Chimes, a magic whose threat will reach far beyond D'Hara.Now it has become terrifyingly clear that the Chimes have the potential to bring down all that Richard and Kahlan have worked to protect, and even the power of the Sword of Truth may not be enough to stem the tide of their unleashed magical force. But if the Chimes cannot be stopped, first they will ravage Richard and Kahlan, then all of D'Hara, and then the entire world ...

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THE POISONWOOD BIBLE
Barbara Kingsolver
Cover of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE

THE POISONWOOD BIBLE

by Barbara Kingsolver · Harper Flamingo

28 wks on list

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility. Dancing between the dark comedy of human failings and the breathtaking possibilities of human hope, The Poisonwood Bible possesses all that has distinguished Barbara Kingsolver's previous work, and extends this beloved writer's vision to an entirely new level. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.

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THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET
Salman Rushdie
Cover of THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET

THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET

by Salman Rushdie · Holt

1 wks on list

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. “Fierce, phantasmagorical … a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel.” —The New York Times Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

Historical bestseller data sourced from the New York Times Book Review, archived by Hawes Publications.