NCW Libraries

Sunshine State offers a unique look at Florida, a state whose economically and environmentally imperiled culture serves as a lens through which we can examine some of the most pressing issues haunting our nation.

"When a family tragedy goes viral, a young girl grapples with how to control her public persona just as she's coming to terms with her private self"--

Comprises forty stories and poems that feature Luke Warmwater, an Ojibwa Vietnam veteran who survived the war but has trouble surviving the peace. Returning to the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation after the war, Warmwater finds poverty, unemployment, and the work of the tribal government may prove greater foes than those he faced in the Vietnam jungle -- yet he finds salvation through family, community, and humor. This twentieth-anniversary edition...

"One of the most acclaimed artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was a gifted novelist, playwright, and essayist. Drawn from three decades of her work, this anthology showcases her development as a writer, from her early pieces expounding on the beauty and precision of African American art to some of her final published works, covering the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing a white...

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues-gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest-visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences. Violette's routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of Julien Sole-local...

"New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb weaves an evocative, deeply affecting tapestry of one Baby Boomer's life--Felix Funicello, introduced in Wishin' and Hopin'--and the trio of unforgettable women who have changed it, in this radiant homage to the resiliency, strength, and power of women. I'll Take You There centers on Felix, a film scholar who runs a Monday night movie club in what was once a vaudeville theater. One evening, while setting...

Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder, Run, and Bel Canto, examines her deepest commitments-- to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband-- creating a resonant portrait of her life.

The second installment in Pearl S. Buck's acclaimed Good Earth trilogy: the powerful story of three brothers whose greed will bring their family to the brink of ruin
Sons begins where The Good Earth ended: Revolution is sweeping through China. Wang Lung is on his deathbed in the house of his fathers, and his three sons stand ready to inherit his hard-won estate. One son has taken the family's wealth for granted and become a...

"From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched...

"From New York Times bestselling author, Tatjana Soli, comes The Last Good Paradise... On a small, unnamed coral atoll in the South Pacific, a group of troubled dreamers must face the possibility that the hopes they've labored after so single-mindedly might not lead them to the happiness they feel they were promised. Ann and Richard, an aspiring, Los Angeles power couple, are already sensing the cracks in their version of the American dream when their...