Central Kansas Library System

Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and a young niece, Ruth. An Oprah Book Club selection and bestseller in hardcover, Drowning Ruth, now in paperback, is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart. Schwarz's first novel explores...

When Susan Tate's seventeen-year-old daughter, Lily, announces she is pregnant, Susan is stunned. A single mother, she has struggled to do everything right. She sees the pregnancy as an unimaginable tragedy for both Lily and herself.

Follows the lives and fortunes of Coco Barrington and her mother, a best-selling author, and her sister, Jane, a successful Hollywood producer, as they approach new relationships and important changes in their lives.

Meredith Stratton worked hard to become a successful businesswoman-and now she owns six elegant inns all over the world. But on a trip abroad she is struck by a strange illness, one that seems to have no physical cause. Meredith has always played by her own rules-and won-and now she must uncover the roots of this mystery ailment that threatens her future happiness. The answers lie buried somewhere in her forgotten past. And with the help of a caring...

"Once, a long time ago, I walked down a night-darkened road called Firefly Lane, all alone, on the worst night of my life, and I found a kindred spirit. That was our beginning. More than thirty years ago. TullyandKate. You and me against the world. Best friends forever. But stories end, don't they? You lose the people you love and you have to find a way to go on. . . ." Tully Hart has always been larger than life, a woman fueled by big dreams and...

Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, masquerading as an ordinary schoolteacher in a quiet small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Mighty Sanze, the empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as its greatest city is destroyed by a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heartland of the world's sole continent,...

When an explosion rips through the nearly empty cafeteria of a Reesburgh (Pa.) Elementary School, lunch mother Rose McKenna leads two girls to safety before racing to rescue her own daughter, Melly. But Rose soon learns that she may face both civil and criminal charges for her heroics because one of the girls she saved was seriously injured in the resulting fire that killed three school staff members.

As the awkward one, Courtney Watson may not be as together as her sisters, but she excels at one thing: keeping secrets, including her white-hot affair with a sexy music producer. Planning Mom's wedding exposes her startling hidden life, changing her family's view of her -- and how she views herself -- forever. When Sienna's boyfriend proposes -- in front of her mom and sisters, for crying out loud -- he takes her by surprise. She already has two...

A saga of three generations of women, plagued by hardships and torn by a devastating secret, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of family. Fifteen-year-old Mosey Slocumb--spirited, sassy, and on the cusp of womanhood--is shaken when a small grave is unearthed in the backyard, and determined to figure out why it's there. Liza, her stroke-ravaged mother, is haunted by choices she made as a teenager. But it is Jenny, Mosey's strong and big-hearted...

Carpenter Noah Yoder agrees to help Lovina Miller make her lifelong dream come true by building a pie shop for her, but the love that grows between them is threatened by mistakes and insecurities from the past.