Akron Public Library

"When Hazel Sharp, daughter of Mirror Lake's longtime local detective, unexpectedly inherits her childhood home, she's warily drawn back to the town--and people--she left behind almost a decade earlier. But Hazel's not the only relic of the past to return: a drought has descended on the region, and as the water level in the lake drops, long-hidden secrets begin to emerge...including evidence that may help finally explain the mystery of her mother's...

When a drought tests the commitment of a mail-order bride from Maine to her new home on the prairie, her stepchildren hope they will be able to remain a family.

"[A]n epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America's most defining eras--the Great Depression. Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with...

"For fans of Jane Harper's The Dry or Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, a searing debut crime novel set in the Australian outback, where the grief and guilt surrounding an unsolved disappearance still haunt a small farming community...and will ultimately lead to a reckoning"--

"After a two-year drought, the Kerrigan ranch is dry as a bone and as dusty as a honky-tonk bible. On the brink of ruin, Kate Kerrigan hires the rainmaker Professor Somerset Lazarus, who promises salvation--in the form of a deluge. Kate is desperate enough to try anything. But when four angry gunmen show up, ready to lynch the phony rainmaker for swindling them out of their money, the Kerrigans have to choose sides fast--before the bullets start to...

In 1934, as the earliest storms of the Dust Bowl descend on the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma, Annie Bell and her husband and children struggle against hardship as the wheat harvest dries out and people around them pack up to leave.

Lois Phillips Hudson eloquently portrays George Custer, a determined and angry man who must battle both the land and the landlord; his hard-working wife Rachel; and their young and vulnerable daughter Lucy. Through their compelling story looms a sense of a whole nation's tragedy during the Great Depression.

To save the tribe from the effects of a devastating drought, Princess Scargo sacrifices her most precious possessions, the miniature fish that live in the beautiful carved pumpkin she received for her seventh birthday.

This is Robert Jordan's never-before-published first novel, which he wrote before his Wheel of Time series. Draw near and listen, or else time is at an end. The watering holes of the Plain are drying up, the fearsome fanghorn grow more numerous, and bad omens abound. Wulfgar, a leader of the Altaii people, must contend with twin queens, warlords, prophets and magic in hopes of protecting his people and securing their future. Elspeth, a visitor from...

In Mississippi in the early 1900s, ten-year-old David Logan's family generously shares their well water with both white and African-American neighbors in an atmosphere of potential racial violence.