Akron Public Library

Irene Steele's idyllic life--house, husband, family--is shattered when she is woken up by a late-night phone call. Her beloved husband has been found dead, but before Irene can process this tragic news, she must confront the perplexing details of her husband's death. He was found on St. John island, a tropical paradise far removed from their suburban life. Leaving the cold winter behind, Irene flies down to the beautiful Caribbean beaches of St. John...

Irene Steele is still recovering from the shock of her life: her loving husband, father to their grown sons and successful businessman, was killed in a helicopter crash. But that wasn't Irene's only shattering news: he'd also been leading a double life on the island of St. John, where another woman loved him, too. Now Irene and her sons are on St. John, determined to learn the truth about the mysterious death and life of a man they thought they knew....

"Roommates Kelly and Chloe are enjoying their lives and their downtown Detroit loft just fine. Kelly is a Victoria's Secret catalog model. Chloe is an escort, until she decides to ditch her varied clientele in favor of a steady gig as girlfriend to eighty-four-year-old retired lawyer Tony Paradiso, a.k.a. Mr. Paradise." "Evenings at Mr. Paradise's house, there's always an old Michigan football game on TV. And when Chloe's around, there's a cheerleader,...

A retelling of the biblical story of mankind's fall from grace. Milton's epic opens shortly after the dramatic expulsion of Satan and his army of angels from Heaven. What follows is a cosmic battle between good and evil that ranges across vast, splendid tracts of time and space, from the wild abyss of Chaos and the fiery lake of Hell to the Gate of Heaven and God's newly created paradise, the Garden of Eden. Controversy still swirls around Milton's...

In 1935, when her mother gets a job housekeeping for a woman who does not like children, eleven-year-old Turtle is sent to stay with relatives she has never met in far away Key West, Florida.

Invasive techniques are used to strip Cal Strople of his old identity so he can be trained as an assassin. Yet fleeting memories remind him of a woman he loves, unbroken loyalties, and the need for survival. His search for truth takes him from the woods of Hungary to the streets of New York.

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos, is a luminous work of fiction inspired by the real-life, 37-year friendship between two towering figures of the late 19th century, famed writer and humorist Mark Twain and legendary explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.Hijuelos was fascinated by the Twain-Stanley connection and eventually began researching and writing a novel that used the scant historical record of their...

"Ten years after the Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J.B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J.B.s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family: J.B.'s cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and his teenage sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths...

Morrison's eagerly awaited new novel--her first since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993--is extraordinary for its breathtaking drive, stylistic panache, and enlivening moral gravitas. Spanning the time from the Reconstruction to the 1970s, this powerful work deftly manipulates past, present, and future as it reveals the interior lives of the citizens of a fictional, all-black town called Paradise.

The epic poem Paradise Lost tells the story of the fall of man. The poem details Satan's journey to the Garden of Eden and his intent to destroy God's new creation, and examines the personalities and motivations of Adam and Eve, before and after the fateful temptation. Paradise Regained was published four years after Paradise Lost, and alternatively focuses on the temptation of Christ and the recapturing on all that man had lost in Paradise Lost....