Frank Carlson Library

When Olympia Rubinstein's twin daughters are invited to a debutante ball, chaos erupts. One twin and Olympia's ex-husband are anxious to go, while the other twin and Olympia's current husband refuse to go.

Just as Carolyn had formed a stronger bond with her Oma Marta than with her mother, so Carolyn's daughter is drawn to her grandma more than to a mom who's caught up in the 1960s counterculture.

Jasmine Houston, a widow with a young son, agrees to harbor former slaves at her horse farm outside of Lowell, even though her father, a plantation owner, supports slavery. When a boardinghouse keeper unwittingly becomes involved with a traveling peddler who sells something infinitely more valuable than shoes, Jasmine is devastated to discover that her son and the former slaves have been kidnapped. Jasmine's determination to free them threatens to...

Reverend John Ames is dying in 1956 in Gilead, Iowa. Glory Boughton has returned to care for her dying father and soon her brother, Jack, the prodigal son, comes home, too. As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets. In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's...

A memoir by the author of The Prince of Tides about his father--the inspiration for The Great Santini--and a reaffirmation that love can conquer even the meanest of men. While the publication of The Great Santini brought Conroy much acclaim, the rift it caused with his father brought even more attention. Their long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an already battered family. But in the final days of Don Conroy's life, the Santini...

While helping to restore the family home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Tessa MacCrae reevaluates her marriage and discovers an old wedding-ring quilt that holds the key to forgiveness, hope, and healing.

An exploration of the shifting relationships among parents and children, and between the surface trappings that symbolize success and the real values that give meaning to lives.

When Vivi and Siddalee Walker, an unforgettable mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a "tap-dancing child abuser," the fallout is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a successful theater director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend, Connor McGill. Vivi's intrepid gang of lifelong girlfriends, the Ya-Yas, sashay...

From the glamorous San Francisco social scene of the 1920s, through war and the social changes of the '60s, to the rise of Silicon Valley today, this extraordinary novel takes us on a family odyssey that is both heartbreaking and inspiring, as each generation faces the challenges of their day. The Parisian design houses in 1928, the crash of 1929, the losses of war, the drug culture of the 1960s--history holds many surprises, and lives are changed...