A Fine Balance
By Rohinton Mistry
A Lesson Before Dying
By Ernest J. Gaines
A Map of the World
By Jane Hamilton
A Million Little Pieces
By James Frey
A Virtuous Woman
By Kaye Gibbons
Anna Karenina
By Leo Tolstoy
As I Lay Dying
By William Faulkner
Back Roads
By Tawni O’Dell
Black and Blue
By Anna Quindlen
Breath, Eyes, Memory
By Edwidge Danticat
Cane River
By Lalita Tademy
Cry, the Beloved Country
By Alan Paton
Daughter of Fortune
By Isabel Allende
Drowning Ruth
By Christina Schwarz
East of Eden
By John Steinbeck
Ellen Foster
By Kaye Gibbons
Fall on Your Knees
By Ann-Marie MacDonald
Gap Creek: The Story Of A Marriage
By Robert Morgan
Here on Earth
By Alice Hoffman
House of Sand and Fog
By Andre Dubus III
I Know This Much Is True
By Wally Lamb
Icy Sparks
By Gwyn Hyman Rubio
Jewel
By Bret Lott
Light in August
By William Faulkner
Midwives
By Chris Bohjalian
Mother of Pearl
By Melinda Haynes
Night
By Elie Wiesel
One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Open House
By Elizabeth Berg
Paradise
By Toni Morrison
River, Cross My Heart
By Breena Clarke
She’s Come Undone
By Wally Lamb
Song of Solomon
By Toni Morrison
Songs In Ordinary Time
By Mary McGarry Morris
Sula
By Toni Morrison
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
By Malika Oufkir
Stones from the River
By Ursula Hegi
Tara Road
By Maeve Binchy
The Best Way to Play
By Bill Cosby
The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison
The Book of Ruth
By Jane Hamilton
The Corrections
By Jonathan Franzen
The Deep End of the Ocean
By Jacquelyn Mitchard
The Good Earth
By Pearl S. Buck
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
By Carson McCullers
The Heart of a Woman
By Maya Angelou
The Known World
By Edward P. Jones
The Meanest Thing to Say
By Bill Cosby
The Pilot’s Wife
By Anita Shreve
The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver
The Rapture of Canaan
By Sheri Reynolds
The Reader
By Bernhard Schlink
The Sound and the Fury
By William Faulkner
The Treasure Hunt
By Bill Cosby
Vinegar Hill
By A. Manette Ansay
We Were the Mulvaneys
By Joyce Carol Oates
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
By Pearl Cleage
Where the Heart Is
By Billie Letts
While I Was Gone
By Sue Miller
White Oleander
By Janet Fitch
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By Sheri Reynolds
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 1997
Members of the Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind spend their days and nights serving the Lord and waiting for the Rapture--that moment just before the Second Coming of Christ when the saved will be lifted bodily to heaven and the damned will be left behind to face the thousand years of tribulation on earth. The tribulation, according to Grandpa Herman, founder of Fire and Brimstone, will be an ugly time: "He said that we'd run out of food. That big bugs would chase us around and sting us with their tails . . . He said we'd turn on the faucet in the bathroom and find only blood running out . . . He said evil multitudes would come unto us and cut off our limbs, and that we wouldn't die . . . And then he'd say, 'But you don't have to be left behind. You can go straight to Heaven with all of God's special children if you'll only open your hearts to Jesus . . .'"
Such talk of damnation weighs heavy on the mind of Ninah Huff, the 15-year-old narrator of Sheri Reynolds's second novel, The Rapture of Canaan. To distract her from sinful thoughts about her prayer partner James, Ninah puts pecan shells in her shoes and nettles in her bed. But concentrating on the Passion of Jesus cannot, in the end, deter Ninah and James from their passion for each other, and the consequences prove both tragic and transforming for the entire community.
The Rapture of Canaan is a book about miracles, and in writing it, Reynolds has performed something of a miracle herself. Although the church's beliefs and practices may seem extreme (sleeping in an open grave, mortifying the flesh with barbed wire), its members are complex and profoundly sympathetic as they wrestle with the contradictions of Fire and Brimstone's theology, the temptations of the outside world, and the frailties of the human heart.
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