Central Kansas Library System

Thomas Gradgrind destroys the spiritual and emotional lives of his children by denying the importance of human feelings.

Jane Austen is one of the founders of classic novels for women. Her most famous novel Pride and Prejudice is rightfully considered to be the masterpiece of the world literature. Walter Scott, Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf and Richard Aldington admired the talented (3z(Bfirst Lady(3y (Bof the English literature. Wittily and directly described actions of the Pride and Prejudice happen in provincial England in the end of eighteenth century. For about...

With Mr. Dashwood's death, his wife and two daughters, Elinor and Marianne, must accustom themselves to genteel poverty. When Marianne meets the man of her dreams, everyone expects a marriage; unaccountably, he rejects her, with devastating effect. It falls to Elinor, the sensible elder sister, to pick up the pieces, while harboring a secret longing of her own. In Sense and Sensibility, the warmth between two very different sisters contrasts with...

Photographs and text, along with personal accounts of actual survivors tell the story of the great fire of 1871 in Chicago.

After the suspicious death of her mother in 1895, sixteen-year-old Gemma returns to England, after many years in India, to attend a finishing school where she becomes aware of her magical powers and ability to see into the spirit world.

In 1844 Edinburgh eighteen-year-old Lady Aileana Kameron is neither an ordinary debutante, nor a murderess--she is a Falconer, a female warrior born with the gift for hunting and killing the faeries who prey on mankind and who killed her mother.

Seventeen-year-old Maggie Duncan is torn between her obligations as a dutiful daughter and her hatred of her father's cruel pursuit of money and power. But on the boundary between childhood and womanhood, Maggie discovers it is not her father who stands in the way of her happiness-it is her own tightly held bitterness. Drawn to a man quietly struggling to overcome his past, Maggie must learn to let go of hatred and embrace divine love and forgiveness....

In 1892, New Fiddleham, New England, things are never quite what they seem, especially when Abigail Rook and her eccentric employer R.F. Jackaby are called upon to investigate the supernatural. First, a vicious species of shape-shifters disguise themselves as a litter of kittens, and a day later, their owner is found murdered with a single mysterious puncture wound. Then in nearby Gad's Valley, now home to the exiled New Fiddleham police detective...

In Manhattan in 1899, five teens of different social classes lead dangerously scandalous lives, despite the strict rules of society and the best-laid plans of parents and others.

"In an alternative version of Victorian London, a seventeen-year-old Dodger, a cunning and cheeky street urchin, unexpectedly rises in life when he saves a mysterious girl, meets Charles Dickens, and unintentionally puts a stop to the murders of Sweeny Todd"--