Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child -- not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power -- the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves. Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones...
Author
Appears on list
Description
2 CHILDREN FOR SALE: The sign is a last resort. It sits on a farmhouse porch in 1931, but could be found anywhere in an era of breadlines, bank runs and broken dreams. It could have been written by any mother facing impossible choices. For struggling reporter Ellis Reed, the gut-wrenching scene evokes memories of his family's dark past. He snaps a photograph of the children, not meant for publication. But when it leads to his big break, the consequences...
Author
Description
"After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution ... Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary...
Author
Description
Women's work is a matter of life and death. Nora Beady, the only female student at a prestigious medical school in Bologna, is a rarity. In the 19th century women are expected to remain at home and raise children, so her unconventional, indelicate ambitions to become a licensed surgeon offend the men around her. Everything changes when she allies herself with Magdalena Morenco, the sole female doctor on-staff. Together the two women develop new techniques...
Author
Appears on list
Description
Patsy Jefferson is the eldest daughter of Thomas Jefferson. She grows up as not only as the daughter of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, she matures as the daughter of the third President of the United States. Growing up, she lost her mother at the age of 10; lived in Paris during her coming out years and experienced the revolutionary fervor there. She comes home and marries a distant cousin, Thomas Randolph. Even though she was...
Author
Appears on list
Description
It's 1947 and American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a fervent belief that her beloved French cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive somewhere. So when Charlie's family banishes her to Europe to have her "little problem" take care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London determined to find...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Description
Abraham Lincoln's ascendance from rumpled lawyer to U.S. president to the Great Emancipator through the eyes of a young asylum-seeker who arrives in Lincoln's home of Springfield from Madeira, Portugal. Showing intelligence beyond society's expectations, fourteen-year-old Ana Ferreira lands a job in the Lincoln household assisting Mary Lincoln with their boys and with the hostess duties borne by the wife of a rising political star. Ana bears witness...
8) Salt houses
Author
Appears on list
Description
On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.
Author
Description
While preparing The Hollywood Glamour Exhibition at the Smithsonian, costume conservator Sylvia Early discovers another name beneath a label and unearths the story of Zora Hough, a talented young seamstress who left her poverty-stricken life in 1924 Jazz Age Seattle behind to realize her dreams of becoming a designer.
2023, The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History: A costume conservator is preparing an exhibition featuring movie costumes...
10) Neverhome
Author
Description
"She calls herself Ash, but that's not her real name. She is a farmer's faithful wife, but she has left her husband to don the uniform of a Union soldier in the Civil War. Neverhome tells the harrowing story of Ash Thompson during the battle for the South. Through bloodshed and hysteria and heartbreak, she becomes a hero, a folk legend, a madwoman and a traitor to the American cause. Laird Hunt's dazzling new novel throws a light on the adventurous...
Author
Description
"All her life, Zofia has found comfort in two things: books and her best friend, Janina. But no one could have imagined the horrors of the Nazi occupation in Warsaw. As the bombs rain down and Hitler's forces loot and destroy the city, Zofia finds that now books are also in need of saving. With the death count rising, Zofia jumps to action to save her friend and salvage whatever books she can from the wreckage, hiding them away and even starting a...
Author
Pub. Date
2012
Description
Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
Abraham Lincoln is a circuit-riding lawyer, a member of the state legislature, a man of almost ungovernable ambition. To his friends he is also a beloved figure, by turns charmingly awkward and mesmerizingly self-possessed -- a man of whom they, too, expect big things. It is through a friend, a fictional poet, Cage Weatherby, that we will come to know Lincoln in his twenties and thirties, as a series of formative, surprising incidents unfolds -- his...
Author
Description
Tells the epic story of Catherine the Great's improbable rise to power--as seen through the ever-watchful eyes of an all-but-invisible servant close to the throne. Her name is Barbara--in Russian, Varvara. Nimble-witted and attentive, she's allowed into the employ of the Empress Elizabeth, amid the glitter and cruelty of the world's most eminent court. Under the tutelage of Count Bestuzhev, Chancellor and spymaster, Varvara will be educated in skills...
Author
Appears on list
Description
On a January morning in 1938, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family's ittar shop in Lahore. Over the years that follow, the perfumer's apprentice and calligrapher's apprentice fall in love with their ancient crafts and with each other, dreaming of the life they will one day share. But as the struggle for Indian independence gathers force, their beloved city is ravaged by Partition. Suddenly,...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"The author of the award-winning Sally Hemings now brings to life Hannah Elias, one of the richest black women in America in the early 1900s, in this mesmerizing novel swirling with atmosphere and steeped in history. A murder and a case of mistaken identity brings the police to Hannah Elias' glitzy, five-story, twenty-room mansion on Central Park West. This is the beginning of an odyssey that moves back and forth in time and reveals the dangerous...
Author
Series
Description
Carolina and James Baldwin's already strained marriage suffers even more when the upper-class couple moves from Baltimore to a small rural town in the Allegheny Mountains where James is to supervise the building of a tunnel for the B&O Railroad amid severe weather and escalating tensions with the Irish railroad workers.
19) Doc: a novel
Author
Description
Born to the life of an educated Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given a choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone he loves in hopes of finding health in the West. Young, scared, lonely and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier in time for an economic crash. Soon he's gambling professionally and living with a high-strung, classically educated Hungarian whore who insists that they...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
A historical novel based on the life of Mary Rowlandson. Even before she was captured by Indians on a winter day of violence and terror, Mary Rowlandson sometimes found herself in conflict with her rigid Puritan community. Now, her home destroyed, her children lost to her, she has been sold into the service of a powerful woman tribal leader and made a pawn in the ongoing bloody struggle between English settlers and native people. Battling cold, hunger,...