Catalog Search Results
1) Vinegar Hill
Author
Language
English
Description
In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilty and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill--a loveless...
Author
Language
English
Description
Pen /Hemingway Award-winning novelist Jane Hamilton follows up her first success, The Book Of Ruth, with this spectacularly haunting drama about a rural American family and a disastrous event that forever changes their lives. Praised by reviewers for its intimate portrayal of the minds of its characters, a novel by the author of The Book of Ruth chronicles one family's decay through guilt and betrayal. Reprint. K. PW.
Author
Language
English
Description
With extensive excerpts appearing in the New Yorker before its release, Tom Drury's groundbreaking debut, The End of Vandalism, drew widespread acclaim and comparison to the works of Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner.
With his fictional Grouse County, Tom Drury conjures a Midwest that is at once familiar and amusingly eccentric-where a thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice, a lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse,...
5) White noise
Author
Language
English
Description
Now a Netflix film!
Winner of the National Book Award, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultramodern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible...
Winner of the National Book Award, White Noise tells the story of Jack Gladney, his fourth wife, Babette, and four ultramodern offspring as they navigate the rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. When an industrial accident unleashes an "airborne toxic event," a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible...
Author
Language
English
Description
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal, bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
Author
Series
Jack Reacher novels volume 9
Language
English
Description
Ex-military investigator Jack Reacher is called in by James Barr, the man accused of a lethal sniper attack on a heartland city that leaves five people dead, and teams up with a young defense attorney to find an unseen enemy who is manipulating events behind the scenes. Six shots. Five dead. One heartland city thrown into a state of terror. But within hours the cops have it solved: a slam-dunk case. Except for one thing. The accused man says: You...
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Language
English
Description
New York Times Notable Book: A Manhattanite seeks Midwestern bliss and finds something else in this "funny, literate [and] often touching story" (People).
Television correspondent Lucinda Trout is unhappy about the superficiality and shallowness of her life in New York, not to mention the latest stratospheric rent hike. Seeking an escape, she proposes a new project: She'll move far, far away, to the wholesome, most-livable-list town of Prairie City,...
10) The gift
Author
Language
English
Description
On a June day, a young woman in a summer dress steps off a Chicago-bound bus into a small midwestern town. She doesn't intend to stay. She is just passing through. Yet her stopping here has a reason and it is part of a story that you will never forget. The time is the 1950s, when life was simpler, people still believed in dreams, and family was, very nearly, everything. The place is a small midwestern town with a high school and a downtown, a skating...
11) Murder book
Author
Language
English
Description
When his ex-wife asks him to investigate a sudden crime wave in the Mid-West, Harry Duncan quickly finds himself in conflict with a violent syndicate that targets both him and his ex.
When a crime wave hits several small midwestern towns, the U.S. Attorney for the region calls on Harry Duncan to investigate. An ex-cop known for his unorthodox methods, Duncan is reluctant to go up against a widespread criminal organization, but the attorney in question...
Author
Language
English
Description
"From National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home comes a moving family saga about three generations of women who struggle to find freedom and happiness in their small Midwestern college town. A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl is a poignant novel about three generations of the Wise family--Evelyn, Laura, and Grace--as they hunt for contentment amid chaos of their own making. Evelyn set aside her career...
Author
Language
English
Description
Lo Gunderson feels trapped in her small midwestern hometown until she sees an ad for a free car in the local paper. To maintain her staunch anticapitalist values, she refuses to spend money on what she can find for free, so this car is the perfect ticket out of the town. Though it doesn't cost any money, it still comes with a price. Blanche Peterson is dying and asks that Lo track down her estranged son. But before she can decide whether to fulfill...
14) Stoner
Author
Language
English
Description
"Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life" -- publisher description (January 2007).
15) Crossroads
Author
Series
Key to all mythologies volume 1
Language
English
Description
"It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless -- unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The Flanagan sisters are as different as they come. Seventeen-year-old Annalie is bubbly, sweet, and self-conscious, whereas nineteen-year-old Margaret is sharp and assertive. Margaret looks just like their mother, while Annalie passes for white and looks like the father who abandoned them years ago, leaving their Chinese immigrant mama to raise the girls alone in their small, predominantly white Midwestern town. When their house is vandalized with...
17) Bedeviled eggs
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Suzanne, Toni, and Petra are preparing the Cackleberry Club Caf ̌for Halloween when mayoral candidate Chuck Peebler is killed and the women set out to find the culprit before the next victim falls.
Author
Language
English
Description
"Ringmaster -- Rin, to those who know her best -- can jump to different moments in time as easily as her wife, Odette, soars from bar to bar on the trapeze. And the circus they lead is a rare home and safe haven for magical misfits and outcasts, known as Sparks. With the world still reeling from World War I, Rin and her troupe -- the Circus of the Fantasticals -- travel the midwest, offering a single night of enchantment and respite to all who step...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Just hours after his wife and her entire family perish in the Christmas Eve tsunami in Brisbane, American expat and former police officer Frank Mercy goes out to join his volunteer rescue unit and pulls a little boy from a submerged car, saving the child's life with only seconds to spare. In that moment, Frank's own life is transformed. Not quite knowing why, Frank sidesteps the law, when, instead of turning Ian over to the Red Cross, he takes the...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands. In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging...