Akron Public Library

Francesca Bodin has a near-perfect life as an accomplished music teacher and professional flutist living in the Vermont countryside with her husband Ben, and their four-year old daughter, Addie. This ends suddenly when a snowmobiling accident traps the three of them in a frozen lake. Ben, after escaping onto the ice, leaves her and Addie to die. Francesca believes she sees their dog pull Addie from the lake and drag her into the nearby woods. Desperate...

Awaiting the arrival of her grandchildren in her home outside Istanbul, bed-ridden widow Fatma shares memories and grievances with her late husband's illegitimate son until his cousin, a right-wing nationalist, involves the family in the Turkish military coup of 1980.

In this new view of the greatest historian of the nineteenth century, historian Wills showcases Henry Adams's little-known but seminal study of the early United States and elicits from it fresh insights on the paradoxes that roil America to this day. Adams drew on his own southern fixation, extensive foreign travel, political service in Lincoln's White House, and much more to invent the study of history as we know it. His chronicle established new...

The Western Wind is a riveting story of faith, guilt, and the freedom of confession. It's 1491. In the small village of Oakham, its wealthiest and most industrious resident, Tom Newman, is swept away by the river during the early hours of Shrove Saturday. Was it murder, suicide, or an accident? Narrated from the perspective of local priest John Reve--patient shepherd to his wayward flock--a shadowy portrait of the community comes to light through...

Holleran has lived the kind of fast-lane gay life, as he says, now wept over in doctors' offices. He knows that desires haven't changed, but the consequences of those desires have. From the porno movie houses to his own bedroom on St. Marks Place, Holleran tells of his last trick, good sex/bad sex, fear, despair--and hope. He says outright what others secretly think, bringing out into the open the nightmares and the enduring passions.

"Forced into marriage with a wealthy man after her Southern family is rendered destitute by the Civil War, Augusta becomes a widow a decade later and finds her circumstances hinging on a missing package in a community torn by racial prejudice, violence and disease."--NoveList Plus.

The memoir of a newspaperman who quit his job to become a cowboy. The author, who was assistant managing editor of the San Francisco Examiner, decided on the switch soon after a divorce. He describes his adjustment to open-air life, fencing, branding and the riding not of horses, but all-terrain vehicles. Such is the lot of a modern cowboy.

"After a hurricane devastates a small town in upstate New York, the lives of three women and their young children are irrevocably changed. Rin, an Iraq War veteran, tries to protect her blind daughter and the three wolves under her care. Naema, a widowed doctor who fled Iraq with her wounded son, faces life-threatening injuries. Beth, who is raising a troubled son, waits out her marine husband's deployment in Afghanistan, equally afraid of him coming...

Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue. Great literature increases knowledge of and desire for the good life by showing readers what virtue looks like and where vice leads. It is not just what one reads but how one reads that cultivates virtue. Reading good literature well requires one to practice numerous virtues, such as patience, diligence, and prudence. And learning to judge wisely a character in a book, in turn, forms...