NCW Libraries

Characters and themes from Stephen King's multiple universes converge in the fictional town of Castle Rock. In season two a feud between warring clans comes to a boil when budding psychopath Annie Wilkes, nurse from hell, gets waylaid in Castle Rock. And as the town celebrates its 400th anniversary, Castle Rock's first settlers -- including Henry Deaver -- find themselves joining in the festivities.

"The day after future NBA superstar Chris Paul signed his letter of intent to play college basketball for Wake Forest, he received a world-shattering phone call. His grandfather, Nathaniel "Papa" Jones, a pillar of the Winston-Salem community where he owned and operated the first Black-owned service station in North Carolina, was mugged and ultimately died from a heart attack resulting from the assault. His funeral filled the largest church in the...

Nine-year-old cousins Rosie, Lily, and Tess make a neighborhood newspaper celebrating all their friends on Cobble Street.

When a bad storm drives all of the farm animals into the barn, can they set aside their fears and welcome wild animals, too?

To a casual visitor, the island of Heavenly Daze is just like a dozen others off the coast of Maine. It is decorated with graceful Victorian mansions, carpeted with gray cobblestones and bright wild flowers, and populated by sturdy, hard-working folks-most of whom are unaware that the island of Heavenly Daze is not just like the other islands of coastal Maine. The small town that crowns its peak consists of seven buildings, each inhabited, according...

So begins The Only Kayak, Kim Heacox's coming-of-middle-age memoir written in the tradition of Edward Abbey, John McPhee, and Henry David Thoreau, with a voice at times tender, irate, funny, and deeply humane. In it, he asks, what does it mean to fall in love with a place that cannot stay the same? When do you hold on? When do you let go? Born in Idaho's Bitterroot Mountains and raised in Spokane, Washington, Heacox moves to Alaska as a young park...

Twig, aged twelve, is practically ignored by classmates and other residents of Sidwell, Massachusetts, but gets along fine with just her mother and brother, whose presence must be kept secret, until descendants of the witch who cursed her family move in next door and want to be her friends.

"Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up at the crack in the stucco ceiling that had been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist at Riverside Community College, he spent his childhood as the subject in psychological...

"I called the bishop of the local ward, and he put the date of your move into the church bulletin, and these gentlemen came to help," Brady, the real estate agent, says. Welcome to Wellsville, Utah. Good-bye, L.A. Liz Stephens has come from Los Angeles to Utah for graduate school, and her brief stint working on a Taco Bell commercial is not much in the way of preparation for taking on the real West. In The Days Are Gods Stephens chronicles a move...

"When a mysterious young woman named Katie appears in the small North Carolina town of Southport, her sudden arrival raises questions about her past. Beautiful yet self-effacing, Katie seems determined to avoid forming personal ties until a series of events draws her into two reluctant relationships: one with Alex, a widowed store owner with a kind heart and two young children; and another with her plainspoken single neighbor, Jo. Despite her reservations,...