Alamosa Public Library

The ambitions, dreams, failings, and innermost thoughts of a diverse group of passengers are revealed as they travel aboard a bus along the backroads of California

Recounts the heroic and adventurous life of a thoroughbred collie who was devoted to his Sunnybank Master and Mistress.

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him.

A wide-ranging fictional portrait of life in postwar America by an acclaimed New Yorker short story writer and #1 New York Times–bestselling novelist.
Irwin Shaw was a star of the New Yorker’s fiction pages in the 1930s and ’40s. His prose helped shape the landscape of post-war fiction, and his work drew from a remarkable life that spanned from American football fields to European battlefields, Broadway...

Earthmen have gone underground to live in overcrowded cities, afraid of the open spaces and scorned by the outer world planets.

A case of mistaken identity ignites this clever mystery from America’s queen of crime
A happy bachelor in Washington, DC, Lawrence “Lollie” Blakeley is just the right age to dance with the grown-up little sisters of the girls he used to know. He is without sentiment—so he claims—but is ruled and frequently routed by his elderly housekeeper. All he really wants is to relax with a round of golf and a trip out...

Swashbuckling British adventurers find triumph and tragedy in nineteenth-century Afghanistan in this novella J. M. Barrie called "the most audacious thing in fiction."   While on tour in India, a British journalist encounters Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, two foolhardy drifters with a plan. Claiming they've exhausted all the schemes and odd jobs they could find in India, the two are in search of an even greater adventure. They tell the journalist...

A fable about the power of books and knowledge, “finely balanced between pathos and comedy,” from one of Czechoslovakia’s most popular authors (Los Angeles Times).
 
A New York Times Notable Book
 
Haňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá...