NCW Libraries

"The Great Recession of 2008 left many young professionals out of work. Promising careers were suddenly ended as banks, hedge funds, and law firms engaged in mass lay-offs and brutal belt tightening. Samantha Kofer was a third year associate at Scully & Pershing, New York City's largest law firm. Two weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed, she lost her job, her security, and her future. A week later she was working as an unpaid intern in a legal aid...

Still haunted by a deadly accident that severed his closest friendships, Nathan Thomas hopes his bad luck is behind him. He is grateful for a loving family, a steady factory job in a town where work is scarce, and close friendships. But a fresh betrayal and a shocking revelation strains his marriage to its breaking point, threatening to take everything he loves away, including his 12-year-old son. As he fights for his family, Nathan is forced to confront...

In country stores and diners, old men gather over breakfast and coffee to swap tall tales. The fish are bigger, danger greater, and adventures wilder in the stories told at a Liars' Table. No harm in stretching the truth when nothing exciting happens in their small town. Until someone steals Purvis Webb's car. Life is hard enough. A wife in a nursing home. An estranged daughter. A grandson he didn't know existed. Unable to accept one more indignity,...

""This is real." Three small words on a film canister found by graduate students Justin and Veronica, who discover a long-lost silent movie from more than a century ago. The startlingly realistic footage shows a young girl transforming into a winged being. Looking for proof behind this claim, they travel to the rural foothills of Tennessee to find Sadieville, where it had been filmed. Soon, their journey takes them to Needsville, whose residents are...

A faily struggles to define itself against a vivid Appalachian landscape through the Great Depression and World War II.

Magic is strictly forbidden in the McGill house, but Delpha McGill has found the family book of spells, and plans to use it to make things a little easier for herself and her mother; Katybird Hearn comes from a rival family of witches, but her magic has been slow to emerge, and she thinks a spell book is just what she needs to help things along--and when a quarrel between the two unleashes a graveyard full of angry zombies the two girls must work...

During a raging snowstorm, a deputy rescues a teenager stumbling along the side of a highway. Battered and starving, the boy reveals only his name--Jaxon with an X. Ten years earlier, six-year-old Jaxon Lathan disappeared from a small North Carolina mountain town. The sheriff thought he had solved the crime, but the boy's return leads to a house of secrets, a mass grave, and the horror of missed opportunities. As the victims are identified one-by-one,...

Tallulah MacBride hasn't been back to North Carolina since her parents' tragic deaths twenty years ago. Now Tal heads to cousin Delta Whittlespoon's famous Crossroads Café in the mountains above Asheville, hoping to find a safe hiding place for her young daughter. What she finds is Cousin Delta gone, the café in a biscuit crisis, and a Scotsman who believes she needs a knight in shining flannel. And then a pair of sinister private eyes shows up....

What if the woods were full of them? And of course they were, the woods were full of everything you didn't like, everything you were afraid of and instinctively loathed, everything that tried to overwhelm you with nasty, no-brain panic. The brochure promised a "moderate-to-difficult" six-mile hike on the Maine-New Hampshire branch of the Appalachian Trail, where nine-year-old Trisha McFarland was to spend Saturday with her older brother, Pete, and...

Against the breathtaking backdrop of Appalachia comes a rich, multilayered post—Civil War saga of three generations of families–their dreams, their downfalls, and their faith. Cataloochee is a slice of southern Americana told in the classic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. Nestled in the mountains of North Carolina sits Cataloochee. In a time when “where you was born was where God wanted you,” the Wrights and the Carters,...