Alamosa Public Library

Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given an awful choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone and everything he loves in the hope that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Young, scared, lonely, and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier just as an economic crash wrecks the dreams of a nation. Soon, with few alternatives...

The voice of Caleb's Crossing belongs to Bethia Mayfield, growing up on a tiny island settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneering English Puritans. Possessed of a restless spirit and a curious mind, Bethia slips the bounds of her rigid society to explore the island's glistening beaches and observe its native inhabitants. At twelve, and the two forge a secret bond that draws each into the alien world of the other. Bethia's father is...

In Chicago in 1920, Hadley Richardson, a quiet 28 year-old, meets Ernest Hemingway. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris and become the golden couple in a lively group of expats, including Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. But the hard-drinking and fast-living cafe life doesn't celebrate traditional notions of family and monogamy. As Hadley struggles with self-doubt...

Hetty "Handful" Grimké, an urban slave in early nineteenth- century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimké household. The Grimkés daughter Sarah has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. On Sarahs eleventh birthday in 1803, she is given ownership of ten-year-old Handful, who is to be her handmaid....

To Christina Olson, the entire world was her familys remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century. Author Christina...

Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelts first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as shes known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful...

"An oral history of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon. Celebrated music critic and cultural historian David Hajdu unravels the mystery of a one of-a-kind artist, a pianist with a rare neurological condition that enables her to make music that is nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. Her name is Adrianne Geffel, praised as "the Geyser of Grand Street" and the "Queen of Bleak Chic." Yet despite her renown, she curiously vanished from...

"A novel about the extraordinary partnership between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune--an unlikely friendship that changed the world, from the New York Times bestselling authors of the Good Morning America Book Club pick The Personal Librarian. The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Mary McLeod Bethune refuses to back down as white supremacists attempt to thwart her work. She marches on as an activist...

A fictionalized account of Grace Marks, a maid who murdered her employer and his mistress in Canada in 1843. A stablehand who was her accomplice and who claimed she put him up to it was hung for the crime, while she ended up in a lunatic asylum. The novel analyzes the question: was she actually less guilty, crazy, or smarter?

Peeling away the myth to bring David to life in Second Iron Age Israel, Brooks traces the arc of his journey from obscurity to fame, from shepherd to soldier, from hero to traitor, from beloved king to murderous despot and into his remorseful and diminished dotage.The Secret Chord provides new context for some of the best-known episodes of David's life while also focusing on others, even more remarkable and emotionally intense, that have been neglected....