Akron Public Library

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing oficer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...

"A deliciously funny, sharply observed novel of family, wealth, love and tennis, this zeitgeisty debut follows three women in an old Brooklyn Heights clan: one who was born with money, one who married into it, and one, the millennial conscience of the family, who wants to give it all away. Rife with the indulgent pleasures of affluent WASPS in New York and full of recognizable if fallible characters (and a couple of appalling ones!), it's about the...

"New York Times bestselling author Laura Thompson returns with Heiresses, a fascinating look at the lives of heiresses throughout history and the often tragic truth beneath the gilded surface. Heiresses: surely they are among the luckiest women on earth. Are they not to be envied, with their private jets and Chanel wardrobes and endless funds? Yet all too often those gilded lives have been beset with trauma and despair. Before the 20th century a wife's...

Bhima, a domestic servant in the household of Sera Dubash, an upper-class Parsi housewife, develops a bond with her employer over the course of many years as they both suffer through abusive marriages, loss, and disappointments, but their friendship still cannot overcome the restrictions of class and money.

Set in one of James' thematic stalking grounds: the Victorian world of 1880s New York high society. Ms. Lucy Carlton, from a pedigreed family of long standing, is married to a crass nouveau riche husband. She feels hemmed in by the stifling codes of female propriety and subservience, and yearns to break free into a more bohemian world. Her father and husband want her to conform to traditional mores, and hand her over to a neurologist to cure her of...

". . . A revealing story of women across six centuries, their limited options, and their desires. Digging into the roots of the debutante ritual, with its ballrooms and white dresses, [the author]- herself descended from a line of debutantes- was fascinated to discover that the debutante ritual places our contemporary ideas about women and marriage in a new light. In this history of the phenomenon, [the author] shares debutantes' own words-from diaries,...

Hidden abuse in upscale marriages.

Corey Sifter is befriended by the wealthy Metarey family, a politically powerful dynasty in New York, and becomes an aide to New York senator Henry Bonwiller as he runs for the Democratic presidential nomination during the Nixon era. A novel about American life and how a tragedy in a presidential campaign affects history, a family, and the life of a young man. Vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and recreate character and fate...

A "novel about two upper-class stay-at-home mothers--one white, one Black--living in a 'perfect' suburb that explores motherhood, friendship, and the true meaning of sisterhood amidst the backdrop of America's all-too-familiar racial reckoning"--