Bent Northrop Memorial Library

""Devastating and heartwarming, and exquisite in every way, this is a book you'll fall deeply in love with and never want to put down." --Kevin Kwan From the author of the New York Times bestseller The Piano Teacher, a beautiful, transporting novel about motherhood, marriage, and friendship Janice Y. K. Lee's blockbuster hit debut, The Piano Teacher, was called "immensely satisfying" by People, "intensely readable" by O, The Oprah Magazine, and "a...

Librarian Martha Storm has always found it easier to connect with books than people--though not for lack of trying. She keeps careful lists of how to help others in her superhero-themed notebook. And yet, sometimes it feels like she's invisible. All of that changes when a book of fairy tales arrives on her doorstep. Inside, Martha finds a dedication written to her by her best friend--her grandmother Zelda--who died under mysterious circumstances years...

Caught between tradition and modernity in 1960s South Korea, a woman in an unhappy marriage struggles to give her daughter a good life.

"Dorothea Benton Frank novels are filled with smart and witty fiction that every reader wants on their bookshelf: soulful, edgy stories about realistic characters familiar to us all that explore the most deeply felt moments of life with wry humor and heart. All Summer Long follows one charming New York couple - prominent interior designer Olivia Ritchie and her husband Nicholas Seymour, an English professor and true southern gentleman. They are seemingly...

"In this powerful memoir, told with fierce honesty and surprising humor, a young woman goes on a journey of healing after abortion--a road trip across the United States with a diverse crew of spiritual teachers and a caravan of new friends. Nineteen years old, a thousand miles from her Kentucky home, Kassi Underwood sat in a doctor's office, shaking with fear. She was pregnant--and broke, unwed, and struggling with alcohol. In a decision that obliterated...

"1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright. Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride...

Dr. Gabriella Mondini, a strong-willed, young Venetian woman, has followed her father in the path of medicine. She possesses a singleminded passion for the art of physick, even though, in 1590, the male-dominated establishment is reluctant to accept a woman doctor. So when her father disappears on a mysterious journey, Gabriella's own status in the Venetian medical society is threatened. Her father has left clues — beautiful, thoughtful, sometimes...

Offered a fantastic job in a rising star's political campaign on condition that she will work abroad and return to Washington after spending a dream year at Oxford, Ella clashes with, and then falls for, an outspoken literature professor with a life-changing secret that forces her to rethink her ambitions.

Katharine, at her wits end over her husband's eccentricities and alcoholism, commits him to a psychiatric facility. It's there that he endures a place he calls Terrorland. At some point he realizes that the longer he stays the less likely he will be released, so he plots his escape. Meanwhile, Katharine struggles to understand what she can do to save her family and her marriage.

What impact can American history have on the life of the vulnerable individual? It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working...