Clara's Heart — Joseph Olshan

Originally published to international acclaim and the basis for the beloved film starring Whoopi Goldberg, Joseph Olshan's prize-winning novel charts the profound, rare friendship between a wise Jamaican woman named Clara and David, a twelve-year-old boy adrift in the wake of his parents' broken marriage. As the two grow closer, she brings him into her special world of patois and Jamaican beauty parlors and shadowy alliances, and he comes to realize that in her native country Clara has left behind a mystery, which he grows determined to unveil. Heralded as a classic, Clara's Heart is at once a moving and comical tribute to unconventional love.