Central Kansas Library System

Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers--Owen's sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother. As Hannah's increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen's boss, as...

"A sinful act ruins the lives of three people, especially that of Hester Prynne, a young, beautiful, and dignified woman, who has conceived a child out of wedlock and receives a public punishment of having to wear a scarlet "A" on her clothing. Despite Hester's attempts through the years to distance herself from her past and repent for her sins, she continues to be rejected by society. A best-seller upon its publication in 1850, The Scarlet Letter's...

"One of the great American novels-and one of America's most popular-featuring a new foreword by Min Jin Lee, the New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko Jay Gatsby seemingly has everything. Everybody who's anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his West Egg, Long Island, mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing, and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby--young, handsome, fabulously rich--always seems...

"Erin is a documentary filmmaker on the brink of a professional breakthrough, Mark a handsome investment banker with big plans. Passionately in love, they embark on a dream honeymoon to the tropical island of Bora Bora, where they enjoy the sun, the sand, and each other. Then, while scuba diving in the crystal blue sea, they find something in the water. Suddenly the newlyweds must make a dangerous choice: to speak out or to protect their secret. After...

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.

""One of her greatest achievements, a book whose afterlife continues to inspire new generations of writers and readers." - The Guardian. This modernist masterpiece, originally published in 1925, chronicles a day in the life of an upper-class Englishwoman. Revolutionary in its psychological realism, the third-person narrative switches between Mrs. Dalloway and her counterpart, Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked World War I veteran. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness...

In this spellbinding blend of suspense and human drama, top photographer Hope Dunne fights to escape a mesmerizing sociopath who holds her in his thrall after she accepts a last-minute assignment to fly to London at Christmas and photograph one of the world's most celebrated writers--an Irish-American author known for novels of thrilling literary darkness.

"Elizabeth and Jackson Shore married young, raised two daughters, and weathered the storms of youth as they built a family. From a distance, their lives look picture perfect. But after the girls leave home, Jack and Elizabeth quietly drift apart. When Jack accepts a wonderful new job, Elizabeth puts her own needs aside to follow him across the country. Then tragedy turns Elizabeth's world upside down. In the aftermath, she questions everything about...

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft...

Nineteen-year-old Annabelle Worthington was born into a life of privilege, raised amid the glamour of New York society, with glorious homes on Fifth Avenue and in Newport, Rhode Island. But everything changed on a cold April day in 1912, when the sinking of the Titanic shattered her family and her privileged world forever. When she is betrayed, and pursued by a scandal she does not deserve, Annabelle flees New York for war-ravaged France, hoping to...