Lamar Public Library

Jack and Laurel Cooper are two hardworking, loving Christian pillars of the community who die in each other's arms one night in the bed-and-breakfast that they own and operate. The event calls their three grown children home for the funeral, including their youngest son, a fugitive from the law who must face an outstanding warrant for his arrest and confront his one true love, now engaged to another man. As events unfold around the funeral, the three...

Clare Burke's life took a devastating turn when she tried to protect her sister, Anne, from an abusive and controlling husband and ended up serving prison time for assault. The verdict largely hinged on Anne's defense of her spouse, all lies, and the sisters have been estranged ever since. Nearly twenty years later, Claire is living a quiet life in Manhattan as an urban birder and nature blogger, when her niece, Grit, turns up on her doorstep. The...

When her daughter runs away to her aunt in California, Merritt Fowler of Georgia takes a plane to bring her back, the trip a welcome change from a demanding husband and an equally demanding mother-in-law who is suffering from Alzheimer's. The scene is set for a steamy romance during an earthquake.

Arthur Opp weights 550 pounds and hasn't left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away, in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school, and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career - if he can untangle himself from his difficult family life. The link between this unlikely pair is Kel's mother, Charlene, a former student of Arthur's. After nearly two decades of silence,...

Painter Elaine Risley, pushing fifty, returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her celebrated work. While there she takes time to confront her past.

Is there ever a deal-breaker when it comes to true love? What happens to the perfect couple when they suddenly want different things? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes--a baby carriage. Isn't that what all women want? Not so for Claudia Parr. And just as she gives up on finding a man who feels the same way, she meets warm, wonderful Ben. Things seem too good to be true when they fall in love and agree to buck tradition with a satisfying,...

Two African American women, Sula and Nel, were life-long friends who grew up in a small, poor Ohio town until Sula left for the big city and returned years later to find that she and Nel are worlds apart.

Years ago, Lyra Davis left behind a world of wealth and privilege and the people she loved most in the world, unable to reconcile the expectations of her celebrated family with the longings of her own wild heart. Now she lives quietly among a community of expatriates on the isle of Capri, slowly, carefully learning to live fully for the first time, flourishing in the friendship of a singular man who recognizes in her a kindred spirit.

Pearl Louie Brandt has a terrible secret which she tries desperate- ly to keep from her mother, Winnie Louie. And Winnie has long kept her own secrets - about her past and the confusing circumstances of Pearl's birth. Fate intervenes in the form of Helen Kwong, Winnie's so-called sister-in-law, who believes she is dying and must unburden herself of all falsehoods before she flies off to heaven. But, unfortunately, the truth comes in many guises, depending...

"This novel is the finale of Ivan Doig's trilogy about the McCaskill family and their alluring Two Medicine country along the hem of the northern Rockies." "Jick McCaskill, the narrator of English Creek, returns as the witty and moving voice in this classic encounter with the American road and all the rewards and travails it can bring. Jick faces his family's - and his state's - legacy of loss and perseverance from the vantage point of Montana's centennial...