National Network for Equitable Library Service

Piedra Negra is an isolated village that is home to many soldiers who were injured in the revolution and now pass their time drinking firewater so intense that they all hallucinate and most never recover. The firewater distiller's daughter, Elena, longs to be a poet. After a chance encounter with Daniel Arcilla, Cuba's most important poet, she wins a national poetry prize and leaves Piedra Negra behind for Havana. There, she encounters a population adjusting to a new way of life post-revolution: spies with secret meetings and black marketeers dealing with censorship.

After Emma accidentally kills her uncle, she's saved by James Killoran, a dissolute dark lord bent on retribution. After her rescue, he decides that she's the perfect instrument to enact his revenge. He just never envisioned that he would fall in love with her.

Tobias Walcott, the Earl of Blade, has learned it is best to exercise rigid control over his passions and emotions in all that he does. Uncaring that it makes him seem cool and aloof to most in the ton, he is content with his desire to only woo agreeable and demur females. Then, unforeseen circumstances see him trapped in a closet at a house party with the last woman he would ever make his countess. Lady Olivia Sherwood is everything he should not desire in a female-unconventional, too decisive, and utterly without decorum. But passion ignites between them and they are discovered.

In the vein of Downton Abbey, Jane Austen's beloved but unfinished masterpiece-often considered her most modern and exciting novel-gets a spectacular second act in this tie-in to a major new limited television series. Written only months before Austen's death in 1817, Sanditon tells the story of the joyously impulsive, spirited and unconventional Charlotte Heywood and her spiky relationship with the humorous, charming (and slightly wild!) Sidney Parker.

When Amelia Allenby escaped a stifling London ballroom for the quiet solitude of the Derbyshire countryside, the very last thing she wanted was an extremely large, if - she grudgingly admits - passably attractive man disturbing her daily walks. Lecturing the surveyor about property rights doesn't work and, somehow, he has soon charmed his way into lemon cakes, long walks, and dangerously heady kisses? The very last place Sydney wished to be was in the shadow of the ruins of Pelham Hall, the inherited property that stole everything from him.

From the bestselling authors of How to be Parisian, what smart, savvy, fabulous French women think, feel and advise as they hit forty on life, love, and everything else Older, but Better, but Older has the playful wit, self deprecation and worldly advice we have come to expect from these bestselling authors, but now that advice is focused on the French woman's mindset as she hurtles towards forty.

Bleak House follows the fortunes and relationships of three characters whose fates are tied to the obscure inheritance case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which is tied up in endless litigation. While many deserving and undeserving claim the inheritance, it is ironically being devoured in legal costs.

Walden is a classic of American philosophy that describes Thoreau's concepts of self-reliance and individualism. In "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," he develops the philosophy of nonviolent political protest.

Here is the dazzling saga of two women: the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Through all of life's discoveries, vagaries, and losses, the women's friendship has remained the gravitational center of their lives.

Joyce Carol Oates chronicles her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State.