The Inheritors
by Harold Robbins | 
Heaven's My Destination
by Thornton Wilder | 
The Glass Painter's Daughter
by Rachel Hore | 
Fathers and Crows
by William T. Vollmann | 
My Heart Laid Bare
by Joyce Carol Oates | 
Consider the Lily
by Elizabeth Buchan | 
Losing Nelson
by Barry Unsworth | 
Ingenious Pain
by Andrew Miller | 
The Anatomist
by Federico Andahazi | 
The Pursuit of Happiness
by Douglas Kennedy | 
Riven Rock
by T. Coraghessan Boyle | 
Lord of the Barnyard
by Tristan Egolf | 
A City of Bells
by Elizabeth Goudge | 
In the Distance
by Hernan Diaz | 
The Right Hand of Sleep
by John Wray | 
Orphan Train
by Christina Baker Kline | 
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon | 
The Invention of Wings
by Sue Monk Kidd | 
Year of Wonders
by Geraldine Brooks | 
The Storyteller
by Jodi Picoult |
Ireland, 1874. In a small whitewashed cottage on the grounds of a great estate, a baby boy is born. His name is Tom Dalton. He is the son of an Irish peasant and her aristocratic lover. And so begins the story of a family whose past is deeply rooted in the turbulence of Irish history but who thrive and flourish in the America of the twentieth century. From the poverty of the Irish immigrant to the wealth of the self-made man; from the sorrows of a young boy, deserted by fortune and family, to the triumph of a patriarch capable of outwitting Fate itself -- this is the story of Thomas Dalton and the women who touch his life. Driven from his ancestral home in Westmeath by his father's vindictive family, young Tom Dalton leaves Ireland and makes his way to America. Befriended by the founders of the Longshoremen's Union, groomed by one of Tammany's most powerful political bosses, Tom fights his way to a place in the glittering mansions of New York's Fifth Avenue. In a landscape filled with the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, the victors and the victims, So Many Partings tells a story about love and betrayal, about a man and the women who shape him: the bewildered mother who abandoned him to save herself... the gentle wife who had defied her father to marry the man she loves... the shrewd madam who pledges her loyal friendship as well as her love... and finally, the high-spirited granddaughter who inherits a greater legacy than wealth. Set against the richness of Irish-American history, So Many Partings is about a passionate family and the triumphs and tragedies that make them unforgettable.