Pines and Plains Libraries

Landmark 19th century novel in which a woman defies the standards of conventional French society.

Having run away with her younger brother to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, twelve-year-old Claudia strives to keep things in order in their new home and to become a changed person and a heroine to herself.

Reverend John Ames is dying in 1956 in Gilead, Iowa, and he in recording his family's story. Glory Boughton has returned to care for her dying father and soon her brother, Jack, the prodigal son, comes home, too.

In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, a girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life," Sean Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another, long afternoons, made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the streets and the stillness and the vertigo of the falling snow...

Taoibain brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that readers not only believe Clytemnestra's thirst for revenge, but applaud it. He inhabits the mind of one of Greek myth's most powerful villains to reveal the love, lust, and pain she feels. Told in four parts, this is a portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is Orestes' story, too:...

Chung investigates the mysteries and complexities of her transracial adoption in this chronicle of unexpected family for anyone who has struggled to figure out where they belong.