Washoe County Library System

""Wonderful. . . . Dark, funny, full of emotional intelligence and gripping from the start . . . beautifully written."-Daily Mail The internationally bestselling author and host of The Graham Norton Show returns with a tense and darkly comic novel thatcasts a caustic light on the relationship between mothers and daughters and truth and self-preservation. Where do secrets live? Carol is a divorced teacher living in a small town in Ireland, her only...

Bestselling author Helen Simonson returns with a splendid historical novel full of the same wit, romance, and insight into the manners and morals of small-town British life as her beloved "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand." It's the summer of 1914 and life in the sleepy village of Rye, England is about to take an interesting turn. Agatha Kent is expecting an unusual candidate to be the school's Latin teacher: Beatrice Nash, a young woman of good breeding...

"With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels,...

Hired to teach four orphaned girls at remote, ramshackle Aldwick Castle, Miss Concordia Glade is pleased to find her pupils both eager and bright. Provided for by an unseen benefactor, they are surrounded at all times by hard-eyed guards in the guise of gardeners. During an investigation into a woman's death, private inquiry agent Ambrose Wells finds himself on the castle grounds -- and in the middle of chaos. The building is in flames. People are...

Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies, leaving her a tansu of homemade plum wines wrapped in rice paper. Within the papers Barbara discovers writings in Japanese calligraphy that comprise a startling personal narrative. With the help of her translator, Seiji Okada, Barbara begins to unravel the mysteries of Michi's life, a story that begins...