Titles starting with M from Vandello Books

Prince Flowerbender needs a companion. Marbleheart--a bored sea otter who is used to adventure but is just lying around of late--seems to fit the bill. Together they set off on a quest that proves to be more dangerous than either of them expected.

Geraldine Brooks takes a very minor character from Louisa May Alcott's LITTLE WOMEN--Mr. March, the girls' preacher father--and makes him the main character in this Civil War novel, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Serving as a chaplain with the Union army, March becomes a teacher on a plantation, where he meets up with Grace, a woman slave he knew years ago. Tormented by the scenes of cruelty and suffering he witnesses--and the casual racism of nearly everyone he encounters--March struggles to keep his ideals intact. Brooks based her vibrant and well-researched portrait of March partly on Bronson Alcott, the New England transcendentalist and father of Louisa May.

Mary's contrary, but is she a murderer? Although the circumstantial evidence against cranky school teacher Mary Barton is overwhelming, attorney Matthew Hope doesn't believe that she murdered three girls and buried them in her back yard in this tricky courtroom drama.

A singing German butcher in North Dakota, and a compelling woman named Delphine Watzka, who falls in love with him, are at the center of Erdrich's novel, another in her series of books set in the small town of Argus. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.

Stories that first appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and other magazines.

An unhappily married couple travels to China, where the wife discovers not only that she doesn't love her husband any longer, but that she has succumbed completely to the Chinese people and their culture. This novel was originally published in 1991.

"Cal" Stephanides recounts his rich family history, beginning with his grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty (secretly siblings), as they leave Greece in the 1920s and settle in Detroit. By the time Calliope is born in 1960, his parents are upper middle-class Greek Americans, but when he is 14 they discover that Calliope is actually a hermaphrodite. Taking the name "Cal," he runs away, finally finding a home in a San Francisco burlesque show. Jeffrey Eugenides's epic novel, like its main character, is a wonderful hybrid creature that perfectly captures three distinctly American stories: the immigrant tale, life in the 1960s suburban world, and finally the gender-bending and identity-altering situations that we associate with the beginning of the 21st century. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2003, MIDDLESEX became both a literary and a commercial success--a success further bolstered by its selection for the Oprah Book Club in 2007.

"Cal" Stephanides recounts his rich family history, beginning with his grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty (secretly siblings), as they leave Greece in the 1920s and settle in Detroit. By the time Calliope is born in 1960, his parents are upper middle-class Greek Americans, but when he is 14 they discover that Calliope is actually a hermaphrodite. Taking the name "Cal," he runs away, finally finding a home in a San Francisco burlesque show. Jeffrey Eugenides's epic novel, like its main character, is a wonderful hybrid creature that perfectly captures three distinctly American stories: the immigrant tale, life in the 1960s suburban world, and finally the gender-bending and identity-altering situations that we associate with the beginning of the 21st century. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2003, MIDDLESEX became both a literary and a commercial success--a success further bolstered by its selection for the Oprah Book Club in 2007.