Washoe County Library System

"The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the...

"One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year—a masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother’s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California state hospital in the 1970s. “A sweeping family epic that took me from one American coast to another…Simpson is so attuned to the family heart.” —Weike Wang, author of Joan Is Okay When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley,...

In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess and soon finds herself in love with her employer who has a terrible secret. Follows the journey of a poor orphan girl who overcomes cruelty, loneliness, starvation and heartbreak on her quest for independence. Her passionate romance with rich, brooding Mr. Rochester, and her discovery of his devastating secret, forces her to choose between love and self-respect....

Mentally ill comedian Arthur Fleck is mistreated by the town of Gotham City, which leads to his downward spiral, bringing him face-to-face with his alter-ego known as the Joker.

Pushing away her devoted husband, a once-successful writer moves back into her bohemian childhood home, where she struggles to come to terms with the mental illness that has overshadowed her life.

A recently released mental patient works as an ice cream man while murdering people, who for various reasons make him unhappy.

"A compassionate and eye-opening examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma-from the eighteenth century, through America's major wars,...

"Billy Milligan can be anyone he wants to be . . . except himself. Out of control of his actions, Billy Milligan was a man tormented by twenty-four distinct personalities battling for supremacy over his body—a battle that culminated when he awoke in jail, arrested for the kidnap and rape of three women. In a landmark trial, Billy was acquitted of his crimes by reason of insanity caused by multiple personality—the first such court decision in...

"Alice Armitage is a police officer. Or she was. Or perhaps she just imagines she was. Whatever the truth is, following a debilitating bout of PTSD, self-medication with drink and drugs, and a psychotic breakdown, Alice is now a long-term patient in an acute psychiatric ward. Though convinced that she doesn't really belong there, she finds companionship with the other patients in the ward despite their challenging and often intimidating issues. So...