Ocean State Libraries

"The beloved and acclaimed William Trevor's last ten stories With a career that spanned more than half a century, William Trevor is regarded as one of the best writers of short stories in the English language. Now, in Last Stories, the master storyteller delivers ten exquisitely rendered tales--nine of which have never been published in book form--that illuminate the human condition and will surely linger in the reader's mind long after closing the...

An English comedy of manners centered on a couple's project to start a preparatory school. To raise cash they place their house on sale, engaging a real estate agent with whom the wife has an affair. By the author of The Tennis Party.

In the 1940s, Coden, Alabama was a hideaway for movie stars - an isolated playground tucked among live oaks and placid bay waters where pleasure and vice could be indulged. By the summer of 1974 Coden's glamour has faded, but it doesn't bother Mimi Bosarge, who is just happy to have a job as a live-in tutor with the wealthiest family in town, the Hendersons. When the Hendersons generously open their arms to Annie, a troubled teenager with no recollection...

"My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy."Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island and the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She's been hired for the summer to tutor a rich local boy named Pip. But when Jude arrives, the family is unsettling. Pip is awkward, overly literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esme;...

Olympia Wingfield is swept up into a scandalous affair with Jared Chillhurst, the future earl of Flame crest.

In a crumbling house in the remote northeastern Himalayas, an embittered, elderly judge finds his peaceful retirement turned upside down by the arrival of his orphaned granddaughter, Sai. Kiran Desai's tragicomic novel The Inheritance of Loss spans two continents and three generations. The story cuts between New York and India, contrasting the menial jobs and meager conditions of immigrant life in the city with the political unrest engulfing an isolated...

A single day in Paris changes the lives of three Americans as they each set off to explore the city with a French tutor, learning about language, love, and loss as their lives intersect in surprising ways.

Why are grown-ups so insane? That's the question Leonard, Norman, Anna and Emma (the twins) try to answer with the help of Norman's new tutor, Balthazar Birdsong (who is also fairly nuts).

"When Jacqueline follows her longtime boyfriend to the college of his choice, the last thing she expects is a breakup. After two weeks in shock, she wakes up to her new reality: she's single, attending a state university instead of a music conservatory, ignored by her former circle of friends, stalked by her ex's frat brother, and failing a class for the first time in her life. Her econ professor gives her an email address for Landon, the class tutor,...