Central Kansas Library System

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for...

Joshua Ryder, an orphaned young man, has decided to head further west from Montana in the spring to settle near the Pacific Ocean and live in solitude with just his books and his horses for company. But a Nez Perce woman and her baby, an old washerwoman, a little girl of Chinese and white blood, and a young woman with red curls all begin to complicate his life. If he runs far enough and fast enough he can probably shake the law. If he stays and tries...

Pressured by her mother to marry a proper gentleman, Caroline Maxwell reluctantly considers Lord Bremerton while harboring a secret longing for adventure and passion with her brother's world-traveling friend, Jack, whose new money and lack of title render him an unsuitable candidate in her mother's eyes.

This novel continues the stories of five interrelated families who struggle with social, political, and economic turmoil in the mid-twentieth century, during which they witness the rise of Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the horrors of World War II. It picks up right where the first book left off, and continues up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs. Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life...

Continuing the story of Ayla and Jondalar, Auel combines her brilliant narrative skills and appealing characters with a remarkable re-creation of the way life was lived more than 25,000 years ago.

When Laura's sister, Carissa, marries her Confederate beau, Laura finds herself in a difficult situation when she overhears plots to kill Union soldiers. Though in her heart she feels she should share this information with Union officer -- and -- romantic interest Brandon Reid, Laura fears she will betray her sister's trust and possibly endanger her sister's life.

In a time of drought and economic depression in 1934, Ella Barron runs her boardinghouse in Texas while caring for her son, Solly, and responds to the calm influence of one of her boarders, David Rainwater, while facing the tension and uncertainty around her.

My Antonia is a straightforward narrative, written in a limpid prose of uncanny descriptive accuracy, about the struggles endured by a family of immigrant pioneers and the small community that surrounds them on the unsettled Nebraska plains.

Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946, he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder wasn't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it - to the sheriff, to his...

USA Today bestselling author: When a sheriff needs backup, Shawn O'Brien is the man to call . . .
From America's bestselling Western authors comes the violent saga of the frontier legend known as the Town Tamer: the man who rides in when all attempts of law and order have failed.
Shawn O'brien—taming a town held hostage by the devil
In Broken Bridle, Wyoming, Jeremiah Purdy, the town's tinhorn sheriff, is...