Central Kansas Library System

"As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation,...

"Sick of running into her cheery ex-husband and his new wife, Leslie Petruso accepts a job at the Virgin River branch of Haggerty Construction and takes the high road right out of town. Now she's got Paul Haggerty's business running like a well-oiled machine. In fact, things are so busy Paul jumps at the chance to hire an extra set of hands. Just like Leslie, Conner Danson has been burned by love. But if Leslie was disappointed by her relationship...

With a wife he loves and an exciting London-based career, architect Charles Waterston's life seems in perfect balance. Nothing prepares him for the sudden end to his 10-year marriage - or his unwanted transfer to his firm's New York office. Christmas is approaching when Charlie leaves New York, heading to Vermont to ski. But a sudden snowstorm strands him in a small Massachusetts town. There Charlie meets an elderly widow who offers to rent him her...

Thirty-four years after Violet Sullivan's unexplained disappearance, Daisy--the not-quite-seven-year-old daughter she left behind--enlists the assistance of private detective Kinsey Millhone to help her find the truth.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a “smashing...fascinating” novel (The New York Times Book Review) that conjures all the American obsessions of the 1980s: sex, greed, envy, real estate, and the American dream.  
In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American preoccupations with the expertise of...

A novel of marriage, infidelity, and obsession follows a new wife who struggles with her unrelenting fascination with her husband's first wife. An unnamed narrator lives with her new husband, his two teenagers, and the presence of his first wife, known to us only as she. Obsessed with her, our narrator moves through her days presided over by the all-too-real ghost of the first marriage, fantasizing about how the first wife lives her life. And what...

"Upon arriving in Kenworthy, California, mail-order bride Juniper Cohen is met by the pounding of the gold mine, an untameable landscape, and her greatest surprise of all: the kind and loving man who awaits her. But when the mine proves empty of profit, and when Juniper's husband, John, vanishes, Juniper is left to fend for herself and her young daughter in the dwindling boomtown that is now her home. Juniper pens letters to her husband but fears...

English professor Elizabeth Lancaster is living her perfectly orchestrated, perfectly dull life when action star FX Fahey-her college boyfriend and one-time philandering husband-shows up with a job offer she can't resist. In order to snag some positive buzz for his upcoming flick, the studio wants FX to gain some serious acting cred. That means taking a part in an avant-garde version of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival....

Shockwaves are running through the small town of Hernia with the news that an enormous, biblical-themed amusement park is to built on its doorstep, destroying the community's peaceful way of life forever. And the man spearheading this so-called Armageddonland? None other than Magdalena's ex-husband, the duplicitous Aaron Miller. At a public event to showcase his plans for the new park, Aaron bites into a delicious homemade tart--with fatal consequences....

"On the run from her overbearing family and a fiancé with more menace than love in his eyes, Hope Conroy finally took refuge in Conard County, Wyoming. A place of safety, maybe even possibility. But what could a former--and pregnant!--socialite do to keep a roof over her head? Divorced rancher Cash Cashford never expected to be raising an angry tween all by himself. Something about Hope told him immediately that she was what his daughter needed....