Central Kansas Library System

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

"The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the...

A PRIZED COLLECTION OF AMERICAN FICTION—FROM AMERICA’S FAVORITE STORYTELLER
 
This first-rate collection of short stories by the incomparable Louis L’Amour showcases the legendary writer at his very best: spinning a fascinating and wholly authentic set of unforgettable tales. In these extraordinary stories, we meet a man who is forced to defend himself by taking another’s life—and must pay for his...

Award-winning author Peter D. Kiernan focuses on America's greatest challenge--and opportunity--restoring the middle class to its full promise and potential. Our educated, skilled, and motivated middle class was the cornerstone of America's postwar economic might, but the country's dynamic core has struggled and changed dramatically through the last three decades. Kiernan's extensively researched story, told through individual histories, shows how...

"From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six,...

"For readers of Unbroken, out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times--the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the University...

Sixteen-year-old Catholic Stefania Podgórska has worked in the Diamant family's grocery store in for four years, even falling in love with one of their sons, Izio; but when the Nazis came to Przemsyl, Poland, the Jewish Diamants are forced into the ghetto (and worse) and only Izio's brother Max manages to escape, and Stefania embarks on a dangerous course--protecting thirteen Jews in her attic, caring for her younger sister, Helena, and keeping everything...

Notable conservative historian Larry Schweikart takes an in-depth look at seven transformative moments in our nation's history and provides an analysis of how each of them spurred a trend that either confirmed or departed from the vision our Founding Fathers had for America.

"In her now classic novel Outlander, Diana Gabaldon told the story of Claire Randall, an English ex-combat nurse who walks through a stone circle in the Scottish Highlands in 1946, and disappears into 1743...Now the story continues in Written in My Own Heart's Blood. 1778: France declares war on Great Britain, the British army leaves Philadelphia, and George Washington's troops leave Valley Forge in pursuit. At this moment, Jamie Fraser returns from...

With her now-classic novel Outlander, Diana Gabaldon introduced two unforgettable characters — Claire Randall and Jamie Fraser—delighting readers with a story of adventure and love that spanned two centuries. Now Gabaldon returns to that extraordinary time and place in this vivid, powerful follow-up to Outlander....For twenty years Claire Randall has kept her secrets. But now she is returning with her grown daughter to Scotland’s majestic mist-shrouded...