Central Kansas Library System

Runaways Axi, sixteen, and Robinson, seventeen, who met on a cancer ward, leave small-town Oregon on a cross-country trip to experience the best of life before it is too late.

Hope Anderson is at a crossroads. At 36, she's been dating her boyfriend, an orthopedic surgeon, for six years. With no wedding plans in sight, and her father recently diagnosed with ALS, she decides to use a week at her family's cottage in Sunset Beach, North Carolina, to ready the house for sale and mull over some difficult decisions about her future. Tru Walls has never visited North Carolina, but is summoned to Sunset Beach by a letter from a...

Alice Howland -- Harvard professor, gifted researcher, and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children -- sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. She has taken the route for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Medical consults reveal early-onset Alzheimer's. Alice slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, as told from her perspective. She gradually loses the ability...

The tale of Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bellringer of Notre Dame Cathedral, and his struggles to save the beautiful gypsy dancer Esmeralda from being unjustly executed.

Disfigured by boiling water, Finch Nobles is so ugly people shun her. So Finch, who is employed as a caretaker in a cemetery, finds company in the dead who talk to her. Among her friends are the spirits of a beauty queen and of a homeless man.

When Rick Denton reluctantly returns home at Thanksgiving following his stepfather's stroke, he finds himself spending December working in the family bookstore. His task is lightened only by the company of the young woman working with him.

In this novel of compassion and courage, a solitary kiss changes lives forever when a man and a woman traveling together are involved in a horrific accident. It takes all their strength and courage to begin the long journey to recovery and heal the pain in their bodies as well as their spirits.

Born at the beginning of the millenial or "me-first" generation, Andy Marso grew up believing he was smart, talented and entitled to his dreams. He coasted through school with minimal effort, but weeks before he entered the "real world," Marso was struck down by a bacterial infection that changed everything. In this first-person narrative, Marso, a professional journalist who has written for the Washington Post and the Topeka Capital-Journal, details...

One journalist's surprisingly hopeful in-the-trenches look at Alzheimer's, the disease that claimed her mother's life. Like many loved ones of Alzheimer's sufferers, Lauren Kessler was devastated by the disease that seemed to turn her mother into another person before claiming her life altogether. To deal with the pain of her loss, and to better understand the confounding aspects of living with this disease, Kessler enlisted as a caregiver at a facility...