Showing results for "Small World" in World Literature

There's a reason Emmeline Frothingham left her hometown of Creek Water, Missouri, as soon as humanly possible. That reason is small-minded, judgmental people. After graduating from college, Emmie gets her dream job in New York City. As the head buyer at Silver Spoons - a high-end boutique - and single girl about town, her life is ideal. That is, until the night of The Event, her company's annual awards ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Facing the repercussions of her wild night, Emmie is forced to go home to work in her family's business.

Arthur and Jake are brothers yet worlds apart. Arthur is older, shy, dutiful and set to inherit his father's farm. Jake is younger, handsome and reckless, a dangerous man to know. When Laura arrives in their rural community, the fragile balance of the brothers' rivalry is pushed to the edge of catastrophe.

In a small Southern town where loyalty to family and to "your people" carries the weight of a sacred oath, defying those unspoken rules can be a deadly proposition. After 15 years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn't being pushed around, he is being completely ignored.

In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners' bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar.

Welcome to Travers Corners, a dusty Montana town, where nothing much has happened since Herbert Hoover stopped for gas. Travers Corners, like most small towns, has no newspaper, no radio station; but here, large trout - no better than large trout, fictitious trout - await the angler. And apart from spreading gossip outside the McCraken’s General Store, the residents of Travers Corners love nothing more than fly fishing. Scott Waldie’s delightful cast of characters breathes life into this tiny, out-of-the-way town.

The Center for women's reproductive health offers a last chance at hope - but nobody ends up there by choice. Its very existence is controversial, and to the demonstrators who barricade the building every day, the service it offers is no different from legalised murder. Now life and death decisions are being made horrifyingly real: a lone protester with a gun has taken the staff, patients and visitors hostage.

Four years after her tumultuous senior year, Jade Daniels is released from prison right before Christmas when her conviction is overturned. But life beyond bars takes a dangerous turn as soon as she returns to Proofrock. Convicted Serial Killer, Dark Mill South, seeking revenge for thirty-eight Dakota men hanged in 1862, escapes from his prison transfer due to a blizzard, just outside of Proofrock, Idaho.

The ritual killing of a young Apache girl on a reservation in rural Arizona takes the listener through many complex layers of relationships between Apache and Anglo cultures. The myth and spiritual fabric of the Apache community pulls Zeb Hanks, a small town sheriff, through a personal journey, making the murder not just a crime to solve but a cathartic passage. The dead never leave us but they do whisper ghost stories that bring the past back to life. Jake Dablo is a drunken, washed up lawman because of his inability to solve the murder of his only granddaughter.

From Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, comes her masterpiece, 10 years in the writing - an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about taming the wilderness and destroying the forest, set over three centuries. In the late 17th century, two illiterate woodsmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, make their way from Northern France to New France to seek a living.

In 1966, Sook-Yin is exiled from Kowloon to London with orders to restore honour to her family. As she strives to fit into a world that does not understand her, she realises that survival will mean carving out a destiny of her own. Thirty years later, in London, her daughter Lily can barely remember the mother she lost as a small child. But when she is unexpectedly named in the will of a powerful Chinese stranger, she embarks on a secret pilgrimage to Hong Kong to discover the lost side of her identity and claim the reward.

The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist’s estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it’s hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years; the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren’t still best friends; and Sully’s son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one).

Covenant continues the beloved saga of the residents of Jericho, a sleepy town in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, where life and love have as many twists and turns as a winding mountain road. Six weeks have passed since the fateful unfolding of events at the town fourth of July celebration. Questions swirl about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of the town nemesis, Gerald Watson. Was it an accident, or was Watson murdered?

One man finds himself torn between two cultures in this sweeping tale of frontier life in post–Civil War era Texas. In the years following the American War Between the States, the once vacated military presence in west Texas is on the rise to protect the waves of settlers moving into the region. Living peaceably with the Mescalero Apache, half-breed former military scout Holton Lang promotes the tentative harmony between the US cavalry and the Native American population.

An early morning adventure out stealing horses leaves Trond bruised and puzzled by his friend Jon's sudden breakdown. The tragedy which lies behind this scene becomes the catalyst for the two boys' families gradually to fall apart. As a 67-year-old man, and following the death of his wife, Trond has moved to an isolated part of Norway to live in solitude. But a chance encounter with a character from the fateful summer of 1948 brings the painful memories of that year flooding back, and will leave Trond even more convinced of his decision to end his days alone.

Folks in Moab live for ice cream socials, baseball, and the local paper’s weekly gossip column. Sheriff Winston Browne has watched over Moab with a generous eye for a decade, and by now he’s used to handling the daily dramas that keep life interesting for Moab’s quirky residents. But just after Winston receives some terrible, life-altering news, a seemingly mute runaway with no clear origin arrives in Moab. The residents do what they believe is right and take her in - until two suspicious strangers arrive and begin looking for her.

The New Year brings challenges and changes to the colorful Irish village of Ballybucklebo. The Christmas holidays have barely passed before a fire engulfs the humble thatched cottage housing of Donal Donnally and his family. Although the family escapes the blaze more or less unsinged, Donal, his wife, their three small children, and their beloved dog find themselves with nothing left but the clothes on their back.

Cecil Younger, local Alaskan investigator, is neither good at his job nor great at staying sober. When an old Tlingit woman, unimpressed by the police's investigation, hires him to discover why her son, a big-game guide, was murdered, he takes the case without much conviction that he'll discover anything new.

Hitler, Mussolini and Pope Paul V are on fire. Fireworks explode and flaming tar barrels are being dragged through the streets. Bonfire Night in Lewes is the closest England comes to Mardis Gras. In their fifth adventure, Morley, Miriam and Sefton find themselves caught up in the celebrations and the chaos. On the morning after the night before, Sefton goes for a swim in Pells Pool, the oldest freshwater lido in England - in the very centre of Lewes - where he discovers a woman’s body. She has drowned. Is it a misadventure or could it be...murder?

A white woman has been bludgeoned to death with an altar cross in a rural church on Cicada Road in Walterboro, South Carolina. Sam Jenkins, a Black man, is found covered in blood, kneeling over the body. In a state already roiling with racial tension, this is not just a murder case: it's a powder keg. Two young women are murdered on quiet Edisto Beach, an hour southeast of Walterboro, and the killer disappears without a trace. Thirty-four years later, the mystery remains unsolved. Could there be a connection to Stander's case?

Jo and Bethie Kaufman were born into a world full of promise. Growing up in 1950s Detroit, they live in a perfect 'Dick and Jane' house, where their roles in the family are clearly defined. Jo is the tomboy, the bookish rebel with a passion to make the world more fair; Bethie is the pretty, feminine good girl, a would-be star who enjoys the power her beauty confers and dreams of a traditional life.