Alamosa Public Library

Struggling to make ends meet, Barbara Buncle writes a novel inspired by the residents of her village, and not only does it leave the town in an uproar, but the events that happen in the book begin to happen to their real-life counterparts.

"A fresh take on George Orwell as a far more nature-loving figure than is often portrayed, and a dazzlingly rich meditation on roses, gardens, and the value and use of beauty and pleasure in the face of brutality and horror. "In the spring of 1936 a man planted roses." That man was George Orwell, shortly before he went off to fight against fascism in Spain. Today, those rosebushes are still thriving. This is the starting point for Rebecca Solnit's...

Why bestselling novelist Gerald Candless assumed a new identity years before his marriage and the birth of his two daughters isn't revealed until the penultimate chapter of the book, but the effect of his deception on his family drives Vine's deft character studies.

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring...

A brief biography of the world's most famous playwright, using only historically correct information.

"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...

"Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 Booker Prize win was an historic and revolutionary occasion, with Evaristo being the first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize in its fifty-year history. Girl, Woman, Other was named a favorite book of the year by President Obama and Roxane Gay, was translated into thirty-five languages, and has now reached more than a million readers. Evaristo's astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a...

The young Jane Austen is not particularly interested in getting married, although she does find the mysterious Mr. Lefroy an intriguing possibility--but first she has to deal with the accusation that her cousin Eliza is a French spy, and solve a murder.

"Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why—despite all the evidence...

When Beatrix Potter died, few people knew the full story of her life. Margaret Lane's remarkable piece of literary detective work, originally published only three years after Beatrix's death, told her story for the first time. Extensively revised in 1985 to include new material that had come to light, and now available in this eBook format, it remains essential reading for anyone interested in the background to the author of the famous Peter Rabbit...