Central Kansas Library System

"The Man Who Would be King and Other Stories" is a classic collection of some of the most loved short stories of Rudyard Kipling, one of the most important and accomplished English authors of the twentieth century. The youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature at age 42 in 1907, Kipling, who was born in India in 1865, captured in his writing the British Empire in all of its glory and contradiction in unparalleled detail and nuance. Contained...

Desperate for money, Michael Tremayne, Marquess of Falconridge, allows his title to be auctioned off to the highest bidding father, only to find himself tied to the willful Kate Rose, who wants nothing more from her aristocrat husband than unending love.

After an October blizzard, Laura's family moves from the claim shanty into town for the winter, a winter that an Indian has predicted will be seven months of bad weather.

Overview: A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes,...

A novella and stories. In the novella, Rustler Roundup, the lone hero outwits a gang of cattle rustlers, Desperate Men is on a prison break during an earthquake, and in the title tale a cowboy finds women more of a challenge than a cattle drive.

"Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt's sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely...

Outside London behind a stone wall stands Lake House, a private asylum for genteel women of a delicate nature. In the winter of 1859, recently-married Anna Palmer becomes its newest arrival, tricked by her husband into leaving her home, incarcerated against her will and declared hysterical and unhinged. With no doubts as to her sanity, Anna is convinced that she will be released as soon as she can tell her story. But Anna quickly learns that liberty...

The Andrea Gail is a sword fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Billy Tyne is her captain, down-on-his-luck from a recent losing streak, looking to bring back one big score so he and his crew will have the money to stay ashore during the coming winter. So out they go, and they hit it big, hauling in what the crew estimates is a quarter-million-dollars worth of fish. Unfortunately, they haven't paid attention to the weather forecasts or...

Apothecary John Rawlings is intrigued when a letter arrives asking him to investigate an impostor claiming to be the long-lost step-son of a wealthy Bristol merchant in possession of his dead wife's diamond inheritance. John Rawlings' father, Sir Gabriel Kent joins him on the trip to take the healing waters at Hotwell where they socialize with the cr�eme of Bristol society. But Rawlings is compelled to try and solve the mystery and so he must trawl...

The true story of Karen Blixen, a strong-willed woman who runs a coffee plantation in Kenya (British East Africa) in 1914, and her passionate love affair with a big-game hunter. An epic romance of love and loss.