Frank Carlson Library

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

In Uncle Tom's Cabin , Harriet Beecher Stowe created America's first black literary hero as well as the nation's antecedent protest novel. The novel's vast influence on attitudes towards African American slavery was considered an incitation towards the American Civil War; conjointly, its powerful anti-slavery message resonated with readers around the world at its time of publication. With unashamed sentimentality and expressions of faith, Harriet...

An essential collection of classic stories that established Flannery O'Connor's reputation as an American master of fiction—now with a new introduction by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Groff In 1955, with the title story and others in this critical edition, Flannery O'Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition...

A true 20th-century classic from the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Sound and the Fury: the famed harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother.
As I Lay Dying is one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama. Narrated in turn by each of the family members, including Addie herself as well as others,...

Nonny Frett understands the meaning of "between a rock and a hard place." She's got two mothers, "one deaf-blind and the other four baby steps from flat crazy." She's got two men: her husband, easing out the back door; and her best friend, laying siege to her heart in her front yard. She has a job that holds her in the city, and she's addicted to a little girl stuck deep in the country. And she has two families: the Fretts, who stole her and raised...

As her mother always said, nothing happens by coincidence...
Meet Rainey Valentine: thirty-five, twice divorced, a woman with broken dreams but irrepressible hope.When her mother dies, she inherits a truck, an old barrel-racing mare named Lulu and a lifetime supply of Mary Kay cosmetics. So taking a page from her mother's life, Rainey packs it all up and heads off, leaving Valentine, Oklahoma, in her rearview mirror.
Then, somewhere...

When Foster Lanier and Ben Phelps are released from a professional baseball team in 1904, it is the only experience they have in common, until they meet a runaway — a girl-woman named Lottie Parker — on the train that takes them from Augusta, Georgia, and away from their dreams of greatness.

Foster will marry her and father her son.

Ben will escort her home.

And Lottie will change the lives of everyone she meets, from the

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"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds...

When tragedy strikes, Jasmine Houston must uproot her family from the Northern mill town of Lowell and take over her family's Southern plantation, The Willows. But upon her arrival, her antislavery positions cause strife between Jasmine and her neighbors and relatives. Tensions continue to rise until an explosive act - the burning of The Willows - causes Jasmine and her husband to flee north. But lives of the slaves they have promised to protect hand...

Set in a Southern, city-swallowed town, The Garden Angel tells the story of two women and their unlikey friendship. Cutter Johanson is plucky and eccentric, nostalgic about her family's once glorious past. She has her hands full warding off potential buyers from the dilapidated homestead she is determined to keep. Though the neighborhood has changed, even grown shabby, Father Bob's Home for Retarded Men across the street has become a sort of extended...