Spanish Peaks Library District

The story of a woman's devotion to the child who is both her burden and God's singular way of smiling on her.

When the matriarch of a powerful and wealthy Florida family is found drowned and her son and granddaughter show up, claiming Thorn as a long-lost relative, Thorn becomes embroiled with a family he never knew he had as he attempts to solve the murder.

"The Robinas have shared a wonderful life for more than sixty years. Now in their eighties, Ella suffers from cancer and John has Alzheimer's. Yearning for one last adventure, the self-proclaimed "down-on-their-luck geezers" kidnap themselves from the adult children and doctors who seem to run their lives and steal away from their home in suburban Detroit on a forbidden vacation of rediscovery. With Ella as his vigilant copilot, John steers their...

Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland.

Jack, terminally ill and preparing to say goodbye to his family, has a miraculous recovery after his wife is killed in a car accident and struggles to reunite his family at her childhood home on the South Carolina oceanfront.

John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother along to a new zest for life. Years of privation are rewarded on the farm. But when Alexandra falls in love with Carl Linstrum, and her family objects because he is poor, he leaves to seek a different career. After Alexandra's younger...

Henpecked by his domineering wife and manipulated by his hypocritical chaplain, the new bishop, Dr. Proudie, hopes for a quiet life. Instead, he sets off a chain of intrigues and upsets in Victorian Barchester.

This is a tale "told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the...

On a winter night in an east Bengali village in 1879, a 5-year-old girl is married to a tree after her 13-year-old husband-to-be dies of a snakebite on their wedding day. The novel ends some 120 years later, when an ancestor, Tara Bhattacharjee, visits this same village in winter with her teenaged son. Tara and her oldest sister live in America while the middle sister lives in Bombay. Tara and her husband are estranged when the novel opens, but when...

Is there ever a deal-breaker when it comes to true love? What happens to the perfect couple when they suddenly want different things? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes--a baby carriage. Isn't that what all women want? Not so for Claudia Parr. And just as she gives up on finding a man who feels the same way, she meets warm, wonderful Ben. Things seem too good to be true when they fall in love and agree to buck tradition with a satisfying,...