Central Kansas Library System

Midwife Patience Murphy has a gift: a talent for escorting mothers through the challenges of bringing children into the world. Working in the hardscrabble conditions of Appalachia during the Depression, Patience takes the jobs that no one else wants, helping those most in need--and least likely to pay. She knows a successful midwifery practice must be built on a foundation of openness and trust--but the secrets Patience is keeping are far too intimate...

Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long...

A chance to mend their marriage... ...for good? After experiencing three devastating miscarriages, midwife Grace knows her marriage to neonatal surgeon Diego hangs by a thread. But one summer night at Santa Aelina University Hospital they're forced to work together on a challenging case. With nowhere to hide, they must finally confront their heartbreak? Can they rediscover the joy and love that made their marriage so special?

Widow and midwife Sarah Brandt helps the less fortunate of the city bring new life into the world. But when a local doctor is found murdered, the shocking motive may destroy Sarah.

"To Senior Midwife Lucy Ryuan, pregnancy is not an unusual condition, it's her life's work. But when two kidnappings and a vicious stabbing happen on her watch in a university hospital in Manhattan, her focus abruptly changes. Something has to be done, and Lucy is fearless enough to try. Rumors begin to swirl, blaming everyone from the Russian Mafia to an underground adoption network. The feisty single mom teams up with a skeptical NYPD detective...

Season Two continues to follow Jenny and the other midwives as they deal with all the problems the neighborhood of Poplar has to throw at them. A fascinating portrayal of birth, life, death and a community on the brink of huge social change, Call the Midwife offers a gripping insight into a way of life that is so drastically different from how we live now.

"In a village in a medieval fiefdom buffeted by natural disasters, a motherless shepherd boy finds himself the unlikely pivot of a power struggle that puts all manner of faith to a savage test, in a spellbinding novel that represents Ottessa Moshfegh's most exciting leap yet Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, never knew his mother; his father told him she died in childbirth. One of life's few consolations for Marek...

They call her Dark Maggie for her thick black hair, but the name also has a more sinister connotation. As the lone survivor of an attack on her village, she was thought to be cursed--and unfit for marriage. Maggie is also gifted with quick wits and skilled in medicine, trained as a midwife. Venturing to the colonies as an indentured servant, she hopes to escape the superstitions of the old country--and find a home of her own. But what she discovers...