Ocean State Libraries

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen, the out-of-work and hungry are demanding change. In a genteel Camberwell villa -- a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and servants -- impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances's life -- or how far-reaching the disturbances will be.

In a time of drought and economic depression in 1934, Ella Barron runs her boardinghouse in Texas while caring for her son, Solly, and responds to the calm influence of one of her boarders, David Rainwater, while facing the tension and uncertainty around her.

When Arlen Wagner awakens on a train one hot Florida night and sees death's telltale sign in the eyes of his fellow passengers, he tries to warn them. Only 19-year-old Paul Brickhill believes him, and the two abandon the train, hoping to escape certain death. They continue south, but are soon stranded at the Cypress House--an isolated Gulf Coast boarding house run by the beautiful Rebecca Cady--directly in the path of an approaching hurricane. But...

When college student David Rain rents a room in an unusual boardinghouse full of clay dragons, he has no idea that they, along with some lively squirrels, will help jumpstart his writing career.

Forever with her convenient fiancé? Facing bankruptcy, Celine Baylis's family was forced to turn their home into a guesthouse to make ends meet. And it's there she meets a charismatic guest called Nicky... He seems completely taken with her--but so is his kind and charming cousin Dr. Oliver Seymour! When Celine discovers Nicky's already married, she can't help being drawn to Oliver's comforting presence...especially when he proposes a convenient...

While researching the existence of dragons for an essay that could win him a trip to the Arctic, Chris opens himself to the possibility that a great, ancient treasure exists there, guarded by bears, and that he has some role in its protection.

"On the South London home front of World War I, boarding house owner Eithne Clay, her fourteen-year-old son Ralph, her staff, and her tenants suffer their own dramas as the war unfolds." -- "South London, 1916. Eithne Clay runs a shabby-genteel boarding house while her husband is off at the War. When the dreaded telegram arrives at the house, things turn from difficult to desperate. Then along comes the butcher, Neville Turk, big handsome ladies'...

"Peter Weiss's first prose work, The Shadow of the Coachman's Body, was unanimously praised as an original and perfect work of art by critics when it appeared in 1960. Here, in poet Rosmarie Waldrop's stunning translation, Weiss arranges a dark, vividly alive comedy of inert objects in a dismal boarding house-stones, buttons, hooks, needles, chairs, newspapers in an outhouse, clinking tin cups, celestial orbs, sewing machines, an overwound windup...

Bestselling author Kelly returns with an inspiring story of a young widow whorediscovers hope in Illinois in the 1920s.

In 1932, Kit faces a very different Christmas because of her family's financial problems and allows her pride to estrange her from her best friend.