Pines and Plains Libraries

What happens when ordinary, mundane Western lives are thrown into stark contrast against the terrifying realities of war-torn Africa. Their marriage in crisis, Andrew and Sarah O'Rourke impulsively accept a junket to a Nigerian beach resort as a last-ditch attempt to reconcile. When machete-wielding soldiers appear out of the jungle and force them to determine the fate of two African girls, everyone's lives are irrevocably shattered. Two years later...

A feminist manifesto by the great modernist writer contends that women's literature would be on a par with that of men, if women had the same levels of income, privacy, and experience as their counterparts. Her main illustration of this principle is a hypothetical sister to Shakespeare, who, even with the same talents as her brother, would have never been given the chance to display her talents to the world.

Two years after the events of Case Histories left him a retired millionaire, former detective Jackson Brodie has followed Julia, his occasional girlfriend and former client, to Edinburgh for its famous summer arts festival. But when he watches a man brutally attacked in a traffic jam - the apparent victim of an extreme case of road rage - a chain of events is set in motion that will pull the wife of an unscrupulous real estate tycoon, a timid but...

The beautiful town of Bellevue-sur-Mer, tucked between glitzy Monte Carlo and the plush red carpets of Cannes, is home to Theresa, Carol, William, Benjamin and Sally: five retired expats who have pooled their resources to set up La Mosaïque, a divine little restaurant. But there is trouble in paradise: the friends are desperately struggling to make ends meet, and when the much hoped for sale of their Picasso mosaic falls through they realise it will...

"To the Lighthouse features the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests who are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Virginia Woolf constructs a moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflicts within a marriage."--BOOK JACKET

From Patti Callahan, the bestselling author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis, comes another enchanting story that pulls back the curtain on the early life of C. S. Lewis. “Where did Narnia come from?” The answer will change everything. Megs Devonshire is brilliant with numbers and equations, on a scholarship at Oxford, and dreams of solving the greatest mysteries of physics. She prefers the dependability of facts--except for one: the younger brother she...

When Elizabeth Bennet meets Fitzwilliam Darcy for the first time at a ball, she writes him off as an arrogant and obnoxious man. He not only acts like an insufferable snob, but she also overhears him rejecting the very idea of asking her for a dance! As life pits them against each other again and again, Darcy begins to fall for Elizabeth's wit and intelligence and Elizabeth begins to question her feelings about Darcy. But when Darcy saves her youngest...

High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns. and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While. bestselling author John Connolly tells a dark and compelling tale. by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his. company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the. darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination. his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled. into...

"Young Jim Hawkins and his friends set sail for Treasure Island, hoping to find the buried loot of Captin Flint, fiercest of all the pirates. But, unknown to them, the crew of their own ship is made up of Flint's former crew, led by the evil one-legged pirate Long John Silver. Once on the island Jim and his friends must find the buried treasure and escape before the pirates capture them. Robert Louis Stevenson's timeless tale of greed and gold remains...

A young girl living in an Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago ponders the advantages and disadvantages of her environment and evaluates her relationships with family and friends.