Akron Public Library

In an unnamed country (similar to Norway) during World War II, a German sympathizer lures local men and the town's twelve soldiers into the forest long enough for the Germans to take the town. They occupy the home of the mayor as a sign of their power and commandeer the local coal mine. Mayor Orden has never before been a brave or very forceful man, but he is not a fool, and while he tries to keep order in the town, as the Germans demand, he refuses...

Boom times came to the forgotten little southwestern town of Chamisaville just as the rest of America was in the Great Depression. They came when a rattletrap bus loaded with stolen dynamite blew sky-high, leaving behind a giant gushing hot spring. Within minutes, the town's wheeler-dealer's had organized, and with a year, Chamisaville was flooded with tourists and pilgrims, and the wheeler-dealers were rich.

Liam discovers a hidden garden and with careful tending spreads color throughout the gray city.

Dear Reader, I'm not much of a letter writer. As the sheriff here, I'm used to writing incident reports, not chatty letters. I'll tell you straight out that I'd hoped to marry Faith Beckwith but she ended the relationship last month. There were a few misunderstandings between us, some of them inadvertently caused by my daughter, Megan. However, I've got plenty to keep me occupied, like the unindentified remains found outside town. And the fact that...

"Olive Kitteridge has returned, as indomitable as ever ... this time as a person getting older, navigating her next decade as she comes to terms with the changes--sometimes welcome, sometimes not--in her own life. Here is Olive, strangely content in her second marriage, still in an evolving relationship with her son and his family, encountering a cast of memorable characters in the seaside town of Crosby, Maine. Whether it's a young girl coming to...

"The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" is the collaborative work of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized the era of political greed and corruption that followed the American Civil War. This period is often referred to as "The Gilded Age" because of this book. The corruption and greed that was typical of the era is exemplified through two fictional narratives; one of the Hawkins family, a poor family from Tennessee who try to get the government...

This account of several lower class citizens of Dublin describes their activities and tells what some of them were thinking one day in 1904 Publisher Marketing: Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society.

It was the time of the French Revolution - a time of great change and great danger. It was a time when injustice was met by a lust for vengeance, and rarely was a distinction made between the innocent and the guilty. Against this tumultuous historical backdrop, Dickens' great story of unsurpassed adventure and courage unfolds.Unjustly imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, Dr. Alexandre Manette is reunited with his daughter, Lucie, and safely transported...

Thornton Wilder's renowned 1967 National Book Award–winning novel features a foreword by John Updike and an afterword by Tappan Wilder, who draws on such unique sources as Wilder's unpublished letters, handwritten annotations in the margins of the book, and other illuminating documentary material. In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched...

Pinion, Minnesota: a huge city of all of seven hundred folks who define the phrase 'small town'. Nothing has ever happened in Pinion and nothing ever will ... until the mayor of sorts (campaign promise: "I'll Do What I Can") comes up with a scheme to put Pinion on the map. He's heard of a place where a floating image of the Virgin Mary turned the whole town into a shrine, attracting thousands of curious people and making the townsfolk rich overnight....