Ocean State Libraries

Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and that Elizabeth's hopes for her daughter to remain immune from the pull of the darker impulses of drugs and alcohol are dashed. Now, Elizabeth is forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to her, and that her deceptions...

Struggling with the demands of her job, distant husband, spoiled daughter and Alzheimer's patient father, Allison becomes addicted to painkillers and lands in rehab, where amid fellow inpatients she confronts incompatible recovery techniques, barely trained counselors and her own denial. "Allison Weiss has a great job...a handsome husband...an adorable daughter...and a secret. Allison Weiss is a typical working mother, trying to balance a business,...

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we...

Very few books have resulted in the controversy that "The Diary of a Drug Fiend" has caused since its original publication in 1922. While much of the debate is centered on the novel's author Aleister Crowley, the story itself has both enchanted and enraged audiences for nearly a century. Despite being a fictional work, Crowley drew from his own experiences as a heavy drug user for the context of the plot. Peter Pendragon and Louise Laleham, in a drug-induced...

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“[A] creepily effective suspense novel.”—The Seattle Times
After surviving a horrific attack by masked gunmen, Katharine Lawrence awakens in the hospital—with an unfamiliar face staring back at her in the mirror.
 
Katharine may not recognize her appearance, but she does know that she’s twenty-nine, the special assistant to the head of the CIA,...

Emerging from a detox clinic, a young addict must stay clean while living with her long-estranged mother for the next four days.

Two sisters travel the same streets, though their lives couldn't be more different. Then one of them goes missing. "Looks at the anatomy of a Philadelphia family rocked by the opioid crisis and the relationship between two sisters--one, suffering from addiction, who has suddenly gone missing amid a series of mysterious murders; the other a police officer who patrols the neighborhood from which she disappeared: a story about the formidable ties between...

Bill Lee, an addict and hustler, travels to Mexico and then Tangier in order to find easy access to drugs, and ends up in the Interzone, a bizarre fantasy world, in a commemorative edition that features restored text, archival material, Burroughs's own later introduction to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs.

Whether it's an unhealthy consumption of junk foods or involvement in toxic relationships, it's undeniable we all struggle with destructive behaviors. Lawford takes a fresh look at addiction, and gives the coping and wellness skills necessary to overcome obstacles.