Washoe County Library System

Margaret Atwood puts the human heart to the ultimate test in an utterly brilliant new novel that is as visionary as The Handmaid's Tale and as richly imagined as The Blind Assassin. Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around--and fast. The Positron...

An unnamed Sri Lankan inmate has barricaded himself inside a prison computer lab in Dutchess County, New York. A riot rages outside, incited by a poem published in The Holding Pen, the house literary journal. This, our narrators final Editors Letter, is his confession. An official accounting of events, as they happened.As he awaits imminent and violent interruption, he takes us on a roller coaster ride of plot and language, determined to share his...

"Three little girls set off to school one sunny morning. Within an hour, one of them is dead. Fifteen years later, Kitty can't speak and has no memory of the accident that's to blame. She lives in an institution, unlikely ever to leave. But that doesn't keep her from being frightened when she encounters an eerily familiar face. Art teacher Alison looks fine on the surface. But the surface is a lie. She's struggling to make ends meet and to forget...

After a former boxer turns to drug running and is sent to prison, his enemies force him to commit acts of violence that make the prison a more dangerous place.

Civil War, 1863. Virginia. Union soldiers Colonel Thomas Rose and Major A. G. Hamilton were captured by the Confederate Army and taken to Libby Prison, one of the most horrific prisons ever run--infamous for its overcrowded, vermin-infested conditions. But neither fear, nor darkness, nor squealing rats could keep Rose and Hamilton from freedom. They and other POWs would fight against the odds to attempt the largest prison escape in American history....

The epic story of Henri Charriere, a safecracker from the Parisian underworld who is framed for murder and condemned to life in the notorious penal colony on Devil's Island. Determined to regain his freedom, Papillon forms an unlikely alliance with convicted counterfeiter Louis Dega, who, in exchange for protection, agrees to finance Papillon's escape.

Traces the unlikely World War II romance between Yugoslav partisan heroine Josefine Lobnik and New Zealand soldier Bruce Murray and the chance encounter that indelibly transformed their lives.

The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov as he struggles to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. On every page of this graphic depiction of Ivan Denisovich's struggles, the pain of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's own decade-long experience in the gulag is apparent—which makes its ultimate tribute to one man's will to triumph over relentless dehumanization all the more moving. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world...

In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, photographer Wilhelm Brasse was sent to Auschwitz to record the camp's atrocities where he faked documents for prisoners and smuggled photos to the outside world, and, when the war ended, refused to destroy his records so we might never forget.

"Solovetsky occupies the island site of a former monastery in the White Sea. Here, hundreds of miles from civilization, and with a skeleton crew of secret-policemen in charge, some prisoners are consigned to all kinds of forced labor and others sit at comfortable desks in administrative or cultural positions. With the brutal winter fast approaching, Tolya Bogomolov, a young mathematician serving a three-year sentence, hopes an acquaintance he's been...