Central Kansas Library System

In 1940s Brooklyn, New York, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together. Despite their differences (Reuven is a Modern Orthodox Jew with an intellectual, Zionist father; Danny is the brilliant son and rightful heir to a Hasidic rebbe), the young men form a deep, if unlikely, friendship. Together they negotiate adolescence, family conflicts, the crisis of faith engendered when Holocaust stories begin to emerge in the U.S., loss,...

Five young California homemakers forge a bond of friendship that sustains them through the turbulent 1960s and beyond. Meeting weekly, the Wednesday Sisters share a love of writing, literary classics, and the Miss America Pageant--in a moving testament to the mysterious link between friends.

A movie star named Angelo DeMarco finds himself in the care of the girlfriend he left seventeen years ago, who is now a cardiologist, after he suffers a heart attack on a movie set, and their unexpected reunion brings others as well--with his brother, a troubled priest, and the daughter he left behind before she was born, now an angry teenager.

"When Ave Maria takes her daughter to Italy for the summer, she meets a handsome stranger who offers her a life beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Ave Maria is forced to confront what is truly important: to her, to her marriage, and to her family. Brimming with humor, wisdom, honesty, and the drama and local color of mountain life from Virginia to Italy, Big Cherry Holler is a deeply felt, brilliantly evoked story of two lovers who have lost their way...

Retraces the journey of Seabiscuit, a horse with crooked legs and a pathetic tail that made racing history in 1938, thanks to the efforts of a trainer, owner, and jockey who transformed a bottom-level racehorse into a legend.

Ave Maria Mulligan MacChesney has never been a devotee of tarot cards or crystal balls. But when the fortune-teller at the county fair suggests that she "redream" her life, Ave Maria figures a little redirection is in order. Ave Maria's world will never be quite the same again...especially now that there's a teenager smack-dab in the middle of it.

Amanda Eyre Ward plumbs the depths of loss and captures the uplifting power of hope in this stirring novel. How to Be Lost is a devastating portrait of a family ravaged by grief-and by the very human longing to make things right again. Three sisters are on the verge of running away from home when the youngest, Ellie, disappears without a trace. Fifteen years later, sister Caroline finds that she might still be alive.

Dr. Julia Cates child psychiatrists whose career was ruined and confidence shattered is called back to her hometown by her sister Ellie, a police chief, when a six year old girl emerges from the heart of the Olympic National Forest. The child is locked in a world of unimaginable fear and isolation. The media descend on Julia and once again her competence is challenged, but nothing is more important to her than saving the child.

"Soon after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a humanitarian aid group. Surrounded by people whose skills--as doctors, nurses, and therapists--seemed eminently more practical than her own, Rodriguez, a hairdresser and mother from Michigan, despaired of being of any real use. Yet she found she had a gift for befriending Afghans, and once her profession became known she was eagerly sought out by Westerners...

On what might become one of the most significant days in her husband's presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led her to the White House--and the repercussions of a life lived, as she puts it, "almost in opposition to itself." How can she both love and fundamentally disagree with her husband? How complicit has she been in the trajectory of her own life? What should she do when her private beliefs run against her...