Ocean State Libraries

"For decades, three generations of women of Old Depot Grocery have been keeping secrets from each other. When Sarah returns home with hopes of running the store, the long-buried past will be brought into the light and threaten not only to destroy the family business but sever the family ties"--

"From a stunning new voice, comes a powerful debut novel, Perish, about a Black Texan family, exploring the effects of inherited trauma and intergenerational violence as the family comes together to say goodbye to their matriarch on her deathbed. Bear it or perish. Those are the words Helen Jean hears that fateful night in her cousin's outhouse that change the trajectory of her life. Spanning decades, Perish tracks the choices Helen Jean--the matriarch...

"As a child living in his family's apple orchard, Ahmad Torkash-Vand treasures his great-great-great-great grandfather's every mesmerizing world. On the day of his father's death, Ahmad listens closely as the seemingly immortal elder tells him the tale of a centuries-old family curse . . . and the boy's own fated role in the story. Ahmad grows up to suspect that something unseen must be interfering with his family, as he struggles to hold them together...

"Follows four generations of the Montrose family, who have been living with a curse that leaves any person they fall in love with dead, stemming back to a Voodoo sorceress in 1950s New Orleans' French Quarter."--

"America's youth are in crisis. Raised by well-meaning but overprotective parents and coddled by well-meaning but misbegotten government programs, they are ill-equipped to survive in our highly-competitive global economy. Many of the coming-of-age rituals that have defined the American experience since the Founding -- learning the value of working with your hands, leaving home to start a family, becoming economically self-reliant -- are being delayed...

"Three generations of a family grow up and come together around one pecan tree"--

Among the "best American short stories of the past two decades" (The Atlantic Monthly) from one of our most acclaimed writers.

In short stories "so vibrant and alive they have heartbeats, the prose so electric and dazzling it makes the pulse race" (Vanity Fair), a masseuse breaks her rich client's wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily

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"Elzbieta Cherezinska's The Widow Queen is the epic story of a Polish queen whose life and name were all but forgotten until now. The bold one, they call her-too bold for most. To her father, the great duke of Poland, Swietoslawa and her two sisters represent three chances for an alliance. Three marriages on which to build his empire. But Swietoslawa refuses to be simply a pawn in her father's schemes; she seeks a throne of her own, with no husband...

"Three Vietnamese American women mourning the death of the family matriarch recount their lives and childhoods at a crumbling, gothic manor called Banyan House, where the secrets of her grandmother's past come to light"--

"This novel, original published in 1748, tells the story of tragic story of Clarissa Harlowe, a young woman whose family has recently acquired wealth and wants to be part of the aristocracy. Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, Clarissa is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague...