National Network for Equitable Library Service

Effie has had her fair share of lovers and husbands, including the Gillis cousins, who have been a source of as much guilt as joy. But she's more or less given up on being swept away by love, until, in a chance encounter, she meets a person who might very well be the perfect man. Even Effie, as wise as any woman can be to the ways of men, is unprepared for the maelstrom her new love affair will unleash.

Destiny can take many shapes. For Henry, a writer struggling to finish a book about the Holocaust, it arrives in the form of a puzzling envelope from a stranger. The envelope takes him into a taxidermist's workshop. Filled with lovingly preserved animals from all corners of the globe, this place is unlike anywhere he has ever been.

Wishing to avoid the complications of turning down his cousin's widow's Christmas invitation, reclusive retiree Paul Sturgis sets off from the quietude of his London flat for a holiday in Venice. There he meets Mrs. Vicky Gardner, an intriguing and lovely woman in the midst of a divorce and at a crossroads in her life. Although he is avoiding new acquaintances, who might shake up his rather monotonous existence, Paul is surprised to find himself warming to the woman. Then, upon his return to England, his former girlfriend Sarah reintroduces herself into Paul's life.

The series starts in a small West Virginia mining town. Melody Logan feels secure in her father's love but his death leaves her utterly alone. The truth about her father reveals dark deceptions and devastating betrayals.

Iris was married at eighteen to a politically prominent industrialist but is now poor and eighty-two, and living in Port Ticonderoga. While coping with her unreliable body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life.

Liza Ward's spellbinding first novel is told from the very different points of view of three narrators mysteriously linked by a shocking crime and their efforts to heal the past. Based on the Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate murders in Nebraska in the 1950s, Outside Valentine examines the effects of violence and the power of love as the three voices interweave and show the lingering and devastating aftershocks of murder across three generations.

"Jack Ruskin is uniquely qualified to commit a series of perfect murders. A former prosecutor, and now the respected partner of a prestigious law firm, he has the means and the knowledge to kill without leaving a trace of evidence behind." "His targets are criminals themselves, sexual predators beyond reform. He has no connection to them; he simply finds their names in public records. But Jack knows firsthand the devastation these depraved monsters leave in their wake - his own fifteen-year-old daughter was herself a victim.

This edition of Conrad's classic 1912 short story reprints the authoritative text of the 1924 Doubleday Edition together with five critical essays - all newly commissioned - that read "The Secret Sharer" from five contemporary critical perspectives: Psychoanalytic Criticism by Daniel R. Schwarz, Reader-Response Criticism by James Phelan, New Historicist Criticism by Michael Levenson, Feminist and Gender Criticism by Bonnie Kime Scott, and Deconstruction by J. Hillis Miller.