Akron Public Library

Fifty-year-old Alice Howland, a Harvard professor of cognitive psychology, is at the top of her game. Her kids are grown, her marriage secure, her career on fire, when after mere months of forgetfulness she finds herself in the rapidly downward spiral of early onset Alzheimer's disease. With no cure or treatment, Alice struggles to find meaning and purpose in her everyday life as her concept of self slips away. Without memory or hope, she is forced...

"Claire Caspian is a first-rate professor, teaching even the most cynical student to find beauty in literature. But with her own personal story, she isn't as successful. Having recently lost her husband, Claire returns with her young son to the tiny desert town of Romeo, Colorado, where she grew up. There she settles in with her feisty old Abuelita, the richest woman in the county and attempts to rebuild her life. But love comes searching for Claire...

"New York Times and worldwide bestselling "dazzling storyteller" (Associated Press) Isabel Allende returns with a sweeping novel about three very different people who are brought together in a mesmerizing story that journeys from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil. In the Midst of Winter begins with a minor traffic accident--which becomes the catalyst for an unexpected and moving love story between two...

From the award-winning author of The Lake of Dead Languages comes a chilling new psychological thriller about a professor accused of killing her favorite student in a hit-and-run accident. Nan Lewis--a creative writing professor at a state university in upstate New York--is driving home from a faculty holiday party after finding out she's been denied tenure. On her way, she hits a deer, but when she gets out of her car to look for it, the deer is...

Reclusive novelist Aaron Westhaven accepts Olivia Dupree's invitation to speak at a local fund-raising event, but the day he's due to arrive, she gets a call summoning her to the bedside of an unidentified gunshot survivor whose sole possession is her business card. Could this man be the novelist Olivia has grown to think of as a soul mate--or is he in Shadow Falls to kill her?

Aspiring literary scholar Karen Holloway's discovery of a barely legible volume of verse from the nineteenth century encourages her to unlock its mysteries, discovering her own past wrapped up in the manuscript.

After Anne Waverly loses her husband and daughter because of a dangerous mission for the FBI, Anne has no intention of taking another assignment, but then she receives details about a group in Arizona that is raising more than one hundred children who seem too well-behaved to be normal and she knows this is her chance to save other children, even if they aren't hers.

"Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an...

Set in 1953, Katherine Watson is a free-spirited graduate of UCLA who accepts a teaching post at Wellesley College, a women-only school where the students are torn between the repressive mores of the time and their longing for intellectual freedom.

"As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for her incapacitated...