Washoe County Library System

"Ever since she was young, Julie Klam has been fascinated by the Morris sisters, cousins of her grandmother. According to family lore, early in the 20th century the sisters' parents decided to move the family from Eastern Europe to Los Angeles so their father could become a movie director. On the way, their pregnant mother went into labor in St. Louis, where the baby was born and where their mother died. The father left the children in an orphanage...

In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth—breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one—is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the...

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Room brings a slice of his own family history to life through extensive research and rich storytelling. Beginning with his great-great grandfather Abraham Block, acclaimed novelist Simon Mawer sifts through evidence like an archaeologist, piecing together the stories of his ancestors. Abraham's young life in the bleak Suffolk village where his parents worked as agricultural laborers was transformed...

A beautifully imagined tale of the Brontë sisters, "Becoming Jane Eyre" delicately unravels the connections between one of fiction's most indelible heroines and the remarkable woman who created her.