Central Kansas Library System

Cather presents the story of the Nebraska prairie. Alexandra Bergson, daughter of Swedish immigrant farmers, is devoted to the land and suffers the hardships of prairie life.

Zane Grey's debut novel, which he self-published in 1905, "Betty Zane" is the first book in Grey's "Frontier Trilogy" and tells the true biographical story of Elizabeth "Betty" Zane, a hero of the American Revolutionary War and direct ancestor of the author. While under siege at Fort Henry by American Indian allies of the British Army and faced with dwindling supplies, the lovely and sixteen-year-old Betty bravely volunteers to venture out of the...

"In the early 20th century, new schoolteacher Beth Thatcher is assigned a post in a remote mining community in Western Canada. There her courage--and her heart--will be tested in unexpected ways"--

"Andrew Carnegie funded fifty-nine public libraries in Kansas in the early 20th century, but it was frontier women who organized waffle suppers, minstrel shows, and women's baseball games to buy books to fill them. Now, a century later, Angelina returns to her father's hometown of New Hope to complete her dissertation on the Carnegie libraries, just as Traci and Gayle arrive in town, Traci as an artist-in-residence at the renovated Carnegie Arts Center...

With her Westward America! novels, beloved novelist Rosanne Bittner tells the personal stories of some of the brave pioneers who settled this country's early wilderness at great personal risk. Deftly combining soul-stirring romance with true American history, Bittner creates a world in which brave men and women make the greatest sacrifices possible to see their dreams made reality---and with them, the dreams of a young nation. Jonah Wilde has always...

"Conflating her own childhood experiences with those of a celebrated Wagnerian soprano of her day, Willa Cather here introduces Thea Kronborg, a Scandinavian-American singer who rises from a one-story town in Colorado to the Metropolitan Opera House. Along the way she learns her own capacity for the rigorous demands of artistic excellence, and how few of her colleagues are willing to sacrifice ordinary vanities for exacting professional standards....

Four years after the unsolved disappearance of her sixteen-year-old daughter, Lauren Lawton is the only one still chasing the ghosts of her perfect Santa Barbara life. The world has given her daughter up for dead. Her husband ended his own life in the aftermath. Even Lauren's younger daughter is desperate to find what's left of the childhood she hasn't been allowed to have. Lauren knows exactly who took her oldest child, but there is not a shred...

The story follows Hetty "Handful" Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid, and follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), the author allows herself to go beyond the record...

A novella and stories. In the novella, Rustler Roundup, the lone hero outwits a gang of cattle rustlers, Desperate Men is on a prison break during an earthquake, and in the title tale a cowboy finds women more of a challenge than a cattle drive.

Victoria (Tory) Blaisdell longs to live a life as adventurous and independent as that of her heroine, Jan Eyre. When Tory's father loses his job and decides to seek a share of the newly discovered gold in California, Tory stows away on the westbound ship carrying her father and younger brother, Jacob. Though San Francisco is mud-caked, frenzied, and full of wild and dangerous men, Tory quickly finds friends and independence until her father leaves...