Frank Carlson Library

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.

Laughter and wedding bells ring as #1 New York Times bestselling author Jan Karon takes her millions of fans behind the scenes of the most cherished event in Mitford history.

Mitford’s Lord’s Chapel is the home to the most joyful event in years: the wedding of Father Tim Kavanagh and Cynthia Coppersmith. Here at last is A Common Life, and the long-awaited answers to these deeply probing questions:...

Jodie Harland and Bethan Keane had been best friends since childhood. A tragedy drives a wedge between them. During the next few years, the emotional distance between them appears to be finalized when Jodie goes off to college.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Frank and April Wheeler are a bright, beautiful, talented couple in the 1950s whose perfect suburban life is about to crumble in this "moving and absorbing story” (The Atlantic Monthly) from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century.
"The Great Gatsby of my time...one of the best books by a member of my generation." —Kurt Vonnegut, acclaimed author of Slaughterhouse-Five
Perhaps...

An ecologically aware woman battles her land-developer husband over the future of the island she inherited off South Carolina. He wants to build houses, she wants to preserve the island's habitat with its marshes, ponies and Gullah communities of former slaves.

Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and a young niece, Ruth. An Oprah Book Club selection and bestseller in hardcover, Drowning Ruth, now in paperback, is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart. Schwarz's first novel explores...

When Nora Bridge left her husband and her two daughters 10 years ago, she took the only route she could see, and assumed she still had her daughters' love. Now, though she is distant from her own daughters, Nora is the hostess of a radio advice show, where she advises listeners that "family comes first." When a scandal breaks and Nora hits rock bottom, she finds she has to rely on the two people she has betrayed most deeply: her daughters, Ruby and...

Mick and Megan O'Brien finally make plans to walk down the aisle, but not everyone is as happy about the upcoming wedding as they are. There's a good chance complications will keep this reunited couple from ever saying "I do."

Sometimes hope for the future is found in the ashes of yesterday. Shane Gelernter is a man ready to put down roots after years of searching. But is he making the right choice? Or is there a woman somewhere who even now remembers-as does he-those long-ago days . . . and a love that hasn't faced with time? Lauren Gibbs is a successful international war correspondent who gave up on happily-ever-after years ago-when it was ripped away from her. Since...

Meredith and Nina are as different as sisters can be. When their father falls ill, they find themselves together, standing with their cold, disapproving mother, Anya. As children their only connection was the Russian fairy tale Anya often told the girls at night. On his deathbed, their father extracts a promise: the fairy tale will be told one last time--and all the way to the end.