Central Kansas Library System

"The girls of St John the Divine, an elite English boarding school, were notorious for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys, and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued, and cuttingly humorous in the way that only teenage girls can be. For Josephine, now in her thirties, the years at St John were a lifetime ago. She hasn't spoken to another Divine in fifteen years, not since the day the school shuttered its...

"This sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century"-- Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of five boisterous sons. The ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores...

"From the author of the highly acclaimed The Railwayman's Wife, called a "literary and literate gem" by Psychology Today, comes an emotionally resonant and profound new novel of two families, interconnected through the house that bears witness to their lives. When Elsie Gormley leaves the Brisbane house in which she has lived for more than sixty years, Lucy Kiss and her family move in, eager to establish their new life. As they settle in, Lucy and...

Returning to Gilead to care for her dying father, Glory Boughton is joined by her long-absent brother, with whom she bonds throughout his struggles with alcoholism, unemployment, and their father's traditionalist values.

A chance encounter in a nursing home leads to an unexpected friendship between a dowdy housewife and a spry octagenarian who tells her the story of a fiercely independent woman half a century ago, inspiring the housewife to change her life, often with hilarious results.

The lives of Jack and Joy Griffin always seem to come back to Cape Cod, where they honeymooned, as they experience the ups and downs of life, including the deaths of Jack's parents, the marriage of their daughter, and Jack and Joy's divorce.

Set amid the deep, wild woods of the Yukon, "First Light" tells the story of Daniel Albrecht and Kerry Egan, a young couple just beginning their life together- in love, engaged, and, as Kerry soon discovers, expecting their first child. While they are flying home from a work trip in Alaska to plan their wedding back home in Chicago, both engines of their plane catch fire and send the plane careening into a mountainside in the middle of a terrible...

"Lena has lived a long, quiet life on her farm in Wales, alongside her husband and child. But as her end approaches, buried memories begin to return. Of her childhood in Poland, and her passion for science. Of the early days of her marriage, reluctant wife to an army officer. Of the birth of her daughter, whose arrival changed everything. Memories less welcome return, too. Her Polish village, transformed overnight by the Soviets, and the war that...

Takaki Tohno quickly befriends Akari Shinohara when she transfers to his school, but when she must move again at the end of the school year, they decide to keep their close bond by writing letters to one another.

Set in Bombay in the mid-1990s, Family Matters tells a story of familial love and obligation, of personal and political corruption, of the demands of tradition and the possibilities for compassion. Nariman Vakeel, the patriarch of a small discordant family, is beset by Parkinson's and haunted by memories of his past. He lives with his two middle-aged stepchildren, Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her brother, Jal, mild-mannered and acquiescent....