Frank Carlson Library

"After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship in the Pacific, one solitary lifeboat remains, carrying a hyena, a zebra, a female orangutan, a Bengal tiger, and a 16-year-old Indian boy names Pi. His story is a dazzling work of imagination that will delight and astound listeners in equal measure. It is a triumph of storytelling and a tale that will as one character puts it, make you believe in God"--Container.

"A scandalous double homicide in the nation's capital opens the psychological case files on Detective Alex Cross. Until Kay Willingham's shocking murder inside a luxury limousine, the Georgetown socialite, philanthropist, and ex-wife of the sitting vice-president led a public life. Yet few, including her onetime psychologist, had any inkling of Kay's troubled past in the Deep South. Murdered alongside her is Randall Christopher, a respected educator...

Four men--Jess Donner, a Rebel and Southern gentleman; Steve Ellsworth, a ladies man with a foul temper; Stu Wilkens, a Yankee; and Heck Myers, a teller of tall tales--find their friendship sorely tested by a dance hall girl and a gang of outlaws. The four friends have traveled to Dodge City to rest their saddle-weary bodies, but trouble erupts between them and some less than reputable characters over the attentions of a dance hall girl. If the boys...

Bilbo Baggins enjoys a quiet and contented life, with no desire to travel far from the comforts of home; then one day the wizard Gandalf and a band of 13 dwarves unexpectedly. It is a journey that takes Bilbo over rugged mountains and through dark forests. Before he can return home again, Bilbo will use his courage and wits to outsmart hideous creatures, escape from from impregnable fortresses and face down a formidable dragon, and survive an epic...

"Not since Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine has such a powerful and urgent Native American voice exploded onto the landscape of contemporary fiction. Tommy Orange's There There introduces a brilliant new author at the start of a major career. "We all came to the powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling threads of our lives got pulled into a braid--tied to the back of everything...

Gulliver has an itch to travel around the world, but whenever he steps on a ship, bad luck seems to find him. He is shipwrecked, abandoned, marooned, and mutinied against, and each time lands in a strange and curious place. First he discovers the kingdom of the six-inch-tall Lilliputians, then the country of the giant Brobdingnagians, then the island of the academic Laputans, which floats in the sky, and finally the noble realm of the horselike Houyhnhnms....