Washoe County Library System

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Frannys mother, Beverlythus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia,...

Josie and her husband have split up, she's been sued by a former patient and lost her dental practice, and she's grieving the death of a young man senselessly killed. When her ex asks to take the children to meet his new fiancée's family, Josie makes a run for it, figuring Alaska is about as far as she can get without a passport. Josie and her kids, Paul and Ana, rent a rattling old RV named the Chateau, and at first their trip feels like a vacation:...

Holly has always depended on her husband's practical advice to keep her going and despairs when she loses him to brain cancer, until a package arrives filled with advice for carrying on with her life without her beloved husband.

Enon follows a year in the life of Charlie Crosby as he tries to come to terms with a shattering personal tragedy. Grandson of George Crosby (the protagonist of Tinkers ), Charlie inhabits the same dynamic landscape of New England, its seasons mirroring his turbulent emotional odyssey. Along the way, Charlie's encounters are brought to life by his wit, his insights into history, and his yearning to understand the big questions.

An actor in the twilight of his career reflects on a poignant first love affair at the age of fifteen with his best friend's mother and inexplicably lands a role opposite a famous but fragile actress who helps him come to an astonishing realization.

A girl vanishes "on a sunny, late-summer vacation morning" and thus begins a "family's harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths, until all that continues to bind them to each other are the questions they can never bring themselves to ask: At what point does a family stop searching? At what point does a girl stop fighting for her life?"--

Harold and Lucille Hargave's lives have been both joyful and sorrowful in the decades since their only son, Jacob, died tragically at his eighth birthday party in 1966. In their old age they've settled comfortably into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time .... Until one day Jacob mysteriously appears on their doorstep -- flesh and blood, their sweet, precocious child, still eight years old. All over the world people's...

Jonah Steel is knee deep into trying to solve the mystery surrounding his family and his brothers abduction, and the arrival of his best friend has complicated the situationalthough not as much as his infatuation with his brothers therapist, Dr. Melanie Carmichael. The quiet humility of the blond beauty has him enthralled, and he burns for her as he never has for any woman.

Sara traveled all the way from Sweden to Broken Wheel, Iowa to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory. All she wants is to share the books she loves with the citizens of Broken Wheel and to convince them that reading...