Ocean State Libraries

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family

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The agendas of three European men with dubious political histories converge in the aftermath of an 1989 death linked to the fates of myriad Hungarians, Jews, Germans and Gypsies across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.

National Book Award Finalist
The basis for Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
 
“A perfect novel . . . economical, piquant, beautiful, true” that chronicles the lives of a wealthy family in 1930s Kansas through the eyes of its matriarch (Meg Wolitzer, New York Times–bestselling author).
In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate...

The story of a middle-class British family and their struggle to survive during WWII. Mrs. Miniver nobly tends her rose garden while her stalwart husband participates in the evacuation at Dunkirk. She personafies grace under pressure as the Miniver family huddles in their bomb shelter during a Luftwaffe attack, while she is forced to confront a downed Nazi paratrooper in her kitchen, and while she is preparing for her annual flower show despite the...

The seventh season sees each member of the Heck family breaking out of their comfort zones. Oldest son Axl begins his junior year, and the business major starts thinking seriously about his future.

In 1974, the Sellers family is transplanted from London to Sheffield in northern England. On the day they move in, the Glover household across the street is in upheaval: convinced that his wife is having an affair, Malcolm Glover has suddenly disappeared. The reverberations of this rupture will echo through the years to come as the connection between the families deepens. But it will be the particular crises of ten-year-old Tim Glover—set off...

A major literary event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modern literature - the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births...

The Freeling family is a typical middle class family living in the peaceful Cuesta Verde Estates. Steve, his wife Diane, 16-year-old daughter Dana, 8-year-old Robbie, and 5-year-old Carol Ann live in a track house. Soon strange things begin to happen around the house; the pet canary dies, mysterious storms occur, and Carol Ann is summoned to the TV set, where a strange shaft of green light hits her and causes the room to shake. As the curious events...

In the hit show's eighth season, the Heck kids continue to smash through their comfort zones and navigate new situations, which may or may not be comforting to parents Frankie and Mike. Axl may be living out of a Winnebago, but he has discovered the love of his life. Meanwhile, always-optimistic Sue has caught the acting bug in Dollywood and is changing her major to drama. Now in high school, Brick has made it his mission to fit in with his peers,...