Frank Carlson Library

Lydia Wyse is drawn back to her childhood Amish community through her mother's "promise box," and seeks to leave behind her secular life as a book editor when she meets bachelor Gideon Hooley.

Following her mother's tragic death, seventeen-year-old Sarah takes on the role of caretaker to her grieving father and younger brother, which leaves little time and emotional energy for a relationship, but when a school project helps her rediscover her love of art, her perspective shifts. "It's been six months since Sarah's mom died. Three months since her dad fell apart. Sarah has left her fine arts boarding school to take care of her dad and her...

"Gorgeously tactile and sweeping in historical and socio-political scope, Pushcart Prize-winner Madhuri Vijay's The Far Field follows a complicated flaneuse across the Indian subcontinent as she reckons with her past, her desires, and the tumultuous present. In the wake of her mother's death, Kalyani, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that...

"Thirty-six-year-old Grace McAllister never longed for children. But when she meets Victor Hansen, a handsome, charismatic divorced restaurateur who is father to Max and Ava, Grace decides that, for the right man, she could learn to be an excellent part-time stepmom. After all, the kids live with their mother, Kelli. How hard could it be? At thirteen, Ava Hansen is mature beyond her years. Since her parents divorce, she has been taking care of her...

With misgivings, Annalise Silva packed her things and those of her young daughter Leila for the long trip from Hawaii to Cherokee, North Carolina. She'd promised her mother on her deathbed she'd take her ashes to be buried with her people. At her mother's urging, not imagining that her mother would actually die, she'd also promised to stay for a season to comfort her grandmother and to learn more about her Cherokee heritage. As her father had said,...

"Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly. She knows how to lance a boil, make a pie crust, butcher a pig, and tend to every chore that needs doing. What she doesn't know, but is forced to reckon with all too soon, is how to look after children as a mother should ...When Polly succumbs to a long illness, Bertie takes on responsibility for her four younger...

"From #1 New York Times bestselling author Karen Kingsbury comes a brand-new love story in the Baxter Family collection about two people who lost their parents in the same national tragedy two people desperate to find each other and the connection they shared for a single day a day that changed everything. Brady Bradshaw was a child when the Oklahoma City bombing killed his mother. Every year, Brady visits the memorial site on the anniversary to remember...

Growing up, Cassie Carter and her sisters, Karen and Nichole, were incredibly close -- until one fateful event drove them apart. After high school, Cassie ran away from home to marry the wrong man, throwing away a college scholarship and breaking her parents' hearts. To make matters worse, Cassie had always been their father's favorite -- a sentiment that weighed heavily on her sisters and made Cassie's actions even harder to bear. Now thirty-one,...

Fulfilling her mother's dying wish, anthropologist Susannah Connolly travels from her lifelong home on the Connecticut shoreline to the fabled French Camargue, to see its famous white horses, find a mysterious saint linked to her family's history, and fall in love with an American journalist-rancher with a spirited but troubled daughter.

"Two men. Thirty years. John Puller's mother, Jackie, vanished thirty years ago from Fort Monroe, Virginia, when Puller was just a boy. Paul Rogers has been in prison for ten years. But twenty years before that, he was at Fort Monroe. One night three decades ago, Puller's and Rogers' worlds collided with devastating results, and the truth has been buried ever since. Until now. Military investigators, armed with a letter from a friend of Jackie's,...