Ocean State Libraries

All sorts of things begin to happen when an orphaned boarding school student finally meets the wealthy guardian with whom she has corresponded for years sight unseen.

When an anonymous benefactor offers to put Samantha Moore through school, with the stipulation that she write frequent letters to him on her progress, Sam finds safety in the letters as her program and her peers force her to confront her past.

The inspiration for the film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, this resonant story of a mother’s unsettling quest to understand her teenage son’s deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them remains terrifyingly prescient.
Eva never really wanted to be a mother. And certainly not the mother of a boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker,...

A comic novel on an oversexed poet. He is hired to write a biography, an assignment which provides an opportunity to satisfy his sexual appetite by sleeping with all kinds of people, including his goddaughter.

"As England enters World War II's dark early days, spirited music professor Primrose Trent, recently arrived to the village of Chilbury, emboldens the women of the town to defy the Vicar's stuffy edict to shutter the church's choir in the absence of men and instead carry on singing." --

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A NETFLIX FILM • A remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German Occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.
“Treat yourself to this book, please—I can’t recommend it highly enough.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is...

Sam and Hadley West are both trying in their own ways to survive after the unthinkable loss of their only son in Alaska. For Sam, a sports journalist, acceptance means an arduous trek by dogsled across the bleak and beautiful arctic wilderness to find the place where Paul died. For Hadley, it means renting a benignly haunted, salt-soaked cottage off the Maine coast where she begins to paint again. Now, at opposite ends of the country, waiting for...

The international bestseller: a compelling love story from the leading Israeli novelist of his generation "We could be like two people who inject themselves with truth serum, and at long last have to tell it-the truth. I want to be able to say to myself, 'I bled truth with her,' yes, that's what I want. Be a knife for me, and I, I swear, will be a knife for you." An awkward, neurotic seller of rare books writes a desperate letter to a beautiful...

An ecological parable set on a Caribbean island in the 17th Century. The hero is a clubfooted individual by the name of Phosphor who invents a prototype of the camera to record the island's beauty. The project is financed by an unscrupulous patron who intends to exploit it for very non-ecological purposes. By the author of The Jade Cabinet.

A work by turns hilarious and grim, "Evelina" tells the story of a young woman's education in the ways of the world; it vividly renders life in eighteenth-century England and remains a much-read classic