NCW Libraries

"Sabrina Brooks is a wildly successful bestselling author of gripping thrillers. Unlike her fictional characters, Sabrina lives a quiet life in the Berkshires with her two beloved dogs. But behind this peaceful exterior is a dark, painful past. As a child raised by an emotionally distant father, Sabrina rarely felt love. And as an adult, her marriage twisted into an abusive relationship from which she had to escape. Sabrina channeled that fear into...

Essays on the island and its history and traditions from the National Book Award–winning author of The Woman Warrior.
 
In these eleven thought-provoking pieces, acclaimed writer and feminist Maxine Hong Kingston tells stories of Hawai’i filled with both personal experience and wider perspective.
 
From a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and numerous other honors, the essays in this...

"Abandoned by her mother at age seven, Alexandra Winslow took solace in the mystery stories she read with her devoted father--and soon she was writing them herself, slowly graduating to dark, violent, complex crime stories that reflected skill and imagination far beyond her years. After her father's early death, at fourteen Alex is taken in by the nuns of a local convent, where she finds twenty-six mothers to take the place of the one she lost, and...

"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...

"The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays"-- ""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious...

A successful self-help author, recovering from a devastating car accident, finds her life spiraling dangerously out of control in the face of a caterer's murder and her husband's ominous secrets. Bryn Harper, an accomplished self-help author, is still recovering from a devastating car accident that has left her haunted by recurring, smoke-filled nightmares. She can't shake the feeling her dreams contain a warning. Her husband Guy couldn't be more...

Unable to convince anyone that she was pushed before she was rescued from the bottom of a hotel pool, a rising author struggling with depression and memory loss begins to question her sanity as elements from her debut novel mix up with events in her real life.

The internationally acclaimed author presents her first collection of poetry in over a decade that addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, nature, and zombies.

"Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability. With their signature prose, at turns bold, muscular, and luminous, Shayla Lawson travels the world to explore deeper meanings held within love, time, and...

"This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. In a series of intimate, incisive portraits, Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter--who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England--to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed....