Central Kansas Library System

In the summer of his seventeenth year, Samuel Sooleymon gets the chance of a lifetime: a trip to the United States with his South Sudanese teammates to play in a showcase basketball tournament. He has never been away from home, nor has he ever been on an airplane. The opportunity to be scouted by dozens of college coaches is a dream come true. During the tournament, Samuel receives devastating news from home: A civil war is raging across South Sudan,...

A tale of four Chinese-American siblings in New York, and their bewildering return to their roots. In Kinfolk, a sharp dissection of the expatriate experience, Pearl S. Buck unfurls the story of a Chinese family living in New York. Dr. Liang is a comfortably well-off professor of Confucian philosophy, who spreads the notion of a pure and unchanging homeland. Under his influence, his four grown children decide to move to China, despite having spent...

At the outbreak of war, a half-Chinese man sends his family back to America, beginning an absence punctuated only by his letters, and a son who must make sense of his mixed-race ancestry alone Elizabeth and Gerald MacLeod are happily married in China, bringing up their young son, Rennie. But when war breaks out with Japan, Gerald, who is half-Chinese, decides to send his wife and son back to America while he stays behind. In Vermont, Elizabeth longingly...

A poignant tale of childhood and the ties of family, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" will transport the reader to the early 1900s where a little girl named Francie dreamily looks out her window at a tree struggling to reach the sky.

A wealthy painter finds his inspiration, and tumultuous love, in a girl he meets by chance At the turn of the century, an upper-class painter from Philadelphia goes searching for inspiration. He finds his muse on a farm-the farmer's beautiful and humble daughter. His portrait of her becomes one of his most inspired works, but his passion for the illiterate girl doesn't stop at the easel: He returns to marry her and settle down to country life-a journey...

"From the suburbs of Seattle to the villas of Jordan and the refugee camps of the West Bank, on an emotional journey exploring what it means to be a family, Warah tells the story of the Mansours, a sprawling Arab-American family, and the women who married into it"--

This collection of short stories offers a fictional portrait of the characters, language, traditions, and daily life of those living on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

"Born in Wisconsin in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright became obsessed with a set of building blocks his mother had given to him on his ninth birthday. He grew up to become the father of organic architecture and the greatest American architect of all time, having designed more than 1,100 buildings during his lifetime. These included private homes such as the stunning Fallingwater, churches, temples, a hotel, and the world-famous Guggenheim Museum in New...