Central Kansas Library System

A New York Times Bestseller & Oprah's Book Club Pick Young Julie Harmon works "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better. But Julie and Hank's new life in the valley, in the last years of the...

Kim Vogel Sawyer pens an inspiring debut novel whose unforgettable characters resonate with emotional intensity and compelling authenticity. Suddenly all alone in 1894 Kansas, Summer Steadman can't find the employment she needs to settle near the fresh graves of her husband and four children. Bitter against the Lord and refusing to eat, she collapses in despair. Remembering his own painful loss, godly widower Peter Ollenbuger offers her food and shelter...

Ang�elique Latham has grown up at magnificent Belgrave Castle under the loving tutelage of her father, the Duke of Westerfield, after the death of her aristocratic French mother. But when he dies, her half-brothers brutally turn her out, denying her very existence. Ang�elique has a keen mind, remarkable beauty, and an envelope of money her father pressed upon her. To survive, she will need all her resources--and one bold stroke of fortune. Unable...

After an October blizzard, Laura's family moves from the claim shanty into town for the winter, a winter that an Indian has predicted will be seven months of bad weather.

Presents the adventures of a boy and a runaway slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft. Universally acclaimed as one of the greatest creations of American fiction, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of those few books that are read over and over again, with ever increasing enjoyment.

The first novel in The Century Trilogy, FALL OF GIANTS follows the fates of five interrelated families as they move through history. Ken Follett's masterful World Without End was a global phenomenon, beloved by millions and acclaimed by critics as "beautifully detailed [with] a terrifically compelling plot" (The Washington Post) and "wonderful history wrapped around a gripping story" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). FALL OF GIANTS is his new historical...

This novel continues the stories of five interrelated families who struggle with social, political, and economic turmoil in the mid-twentieth century, during which they witness the rise of Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the horrors of World War II. It picks up right where the first book left off, and continues up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs. Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life...

Seventeen year old Veronica "Ronnie" Miller's life was turned upside-down when her parents divorced and her father--a former concert pianist and teacher--moved from New York City to Wilmington, North Carolina. Three years later, she remains angry and alienated from her parents, especially her father ... until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if she spent the summer in Wilmington with him. An unforgettable story of love on...

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...

Master wit Mark Twain selected these twenty-seven stories himself by fifteen of his favorite nineteenth century authors. The order follows that which Twain placed them in in the original anthology, published in 1888. He indulged his comic fancy rather than making a textbook in which all themes or authors are placed together, saying that "This way, you will have to peruse the whole thing before discovering that one of your favorites is not included."...