America 250 Titles for Adults

Updated January 15, 2026
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1776
McCullough, David G.
Paper Book
America's most acclaimed historian presents the intricate story of the year of the birth of the United States of America. 1776 tells two gripping stories: how a group of squabbling, disparate colonies became the United States, and how the British Empire tried to stop them. This book destroys many...
All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake
Miles, Tiya
Paper Book
A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a deeply layered and insightful testament to people who are left out of the archives
Being Heumann : an unrepentant memoir of a disability rights activist
Heumann, Judith E.
Paper Book
A story of fighting to belong in a world that wasn't built for all of us and of one woman's activism--from the streets of Brooklyn and San Francisco to inside the halls of Washington--Being Heumann recounts Judy Heumann's lifelong battle to achieve respect, acceptance, and inclusion in...
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee : an Indian history of the American West
Brown, Dee
Paper Book
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling historyThe New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down" Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent,...
Cold mountain
Frazier, Charles
Audiobook
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and...
The color purple
Walker, Alice
Paper Book
The crucible : a play in four acts
Miller, Arthur
Paper Book
Arthur Miller's classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 - 'one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history' - and the American anti-communist purges led by Senator McCarthy in the 1950s. The story of how the small community of...
The four winds
Hannah, Kristin
Paper Book
'One of the greatest storytellers of our time' - Delia Owens, author of Where the Crawdads Sing 'A story of love, family, unbreakable bonds, bravery and hope' - Christy Lefteri, author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo The Four Winds, an...
The grapes of wrath
Steinbeck, John
Paper Book
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.' Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in...
The great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paper Book
'A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel' Sunday Times, Books of the Century 'It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life' Jay Gatsby is the man who has...
The Joy Luck Club
Tan, Amy
Paper Book
'The Joy Luck Club is an ambitious saga that's impossible to read without wanting to call your Mum' Stylist Discover Amy Tan's moving and poignant tale of immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters. <...
Killers of the Flower Moon : the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI
Grann, David
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FACT CRIME SHORTLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION **NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE STARRING LEONARDO DICAPRIO AND ROBERT DE...
The Lincoln highway
Towles, Amor
Paper Book
THE INSTANT NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF RULES OF CIVILITY AND A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW 'Deserves a place alongside Kerouac, Steinbeck and Wolfe as the very best of the genre' OBSERVER ...
Little women
Alcott, Louisa May
Paper Book
One of the best loved books of all time. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Through...
The nickel boys : a novel
Whitehead, Colson
Paper Book
'RaMell Ross's transcendentally moving and frightening film' (Guardian, New York Film Festival) now a major motion picture and shortlisted for a Golden Globe. WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020 WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION...
The radium girls : the dark story of America's shining women
Moore, Kate (Writer and editor)
Paper Book
Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club choice NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER All they wanted was the chance to shine. Be careful what you wish for... 'The first thing we asked was, "Does this stuff hurt you?" And they said, "No...
There there
Orange, Tommy
Paper Book
**The debut novel from the Booker-longlisted author of Wandering Stars** One of Barack Obama's best books of the year, the New York Times bestselling novel about contemporary America from a bold new Native American voice 'A thunderclap' Marlon...
This tender land : a novel
Krueger, William Kent
Ebook
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! "If you liked Where the Crawdads Sing, you'll love This Tender Land...This story is as big-hearted as they come." --Parade The unforgettable...
To kill a mockingbird
Lee, Harper.
Paper Book
ONE OF THE GREATEST AMERICAN NOVELS EVER WRITTEN WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 'No one forgets this book' Independent 'One of the best first novels I remember ... uniquely unsentimental' Guardian 'There is humour as well as...

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