Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Description
"In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a social circle of lovers and friends navigate tangled webs of connection as they try to figure out what they want, and who they are"--
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group's center are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who...
Author
Description
In the tiny Iowa farm town of Atalissa, a group of intellectually disabled men, all from Texas, lived in a tired old schoolhouse. Every morning, well before dawn, they were bussed to a processing plant to eviscerate turkeys in return for food, lodging, and $65 a month. From 1974 until 2009, the men lived in near servitude, enduring increasing neglect, exploitation, and physical and emotional abuse -- until state social workers, local journalists,...
Author
Description
Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa, a small town in the center of the state. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It's good enough for Jeremy: it's a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago...
4) Golden age
Author
Series
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...
Author
Series
Description
In 1953, the Langdon family at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch, Walter, who with his wife, Rosanna, sustained their farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children, now adults, looking to the future. Only one will remain in Iowa to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, D.C., California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves out of post-World War II optimism through the darker landscape of the...
Author
Description
"Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her pen pal, Amy. When she arrives, however, she finds that Amy's funeral has just ended. Luckily, the townspeople are happy to look after their bewildered tourist--even if they don't understand her peculiar need for books. Marooned in a farm town that's almost beyond repair, Sara starts a bookstore in honor of her friend's memory. All she wants...
7) Some luck
Author
Series
Description
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn first-born; Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land; Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know; Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different; and Claire, who...
Author
Description
"A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises--and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself...In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad--long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter--grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching...
Author
Pub. Date
2008
Physical Desc
viii, 277 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.
Description
The charming story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat of Spencer, Iowa.
The story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat, starts in the worst possible way. Only a few weeks old, on the coldest night of the year, he was stuffed into the book return slot at the Spencer, Iowa, Public Library. He was found the next morning by library director, Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast...
11) Lila
Author
Series
Gilead novels volume 3
Description
Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by a canny young drifter and together they crafted a life on the run. Despite some petty violence and moments of desperation, their life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.
12) Jack
Author
Series
Gilead novels volume 4
Pub. Date
2020.
Description
Marilynne Robinson's mythical world of Gilead, Iowa--the setting of her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila, and now Jack--and its beloved characters have illuminated and interrogated the complexities of American history, the power of our emotions, and the wonders of a sacred world. Jack is Robinson's fourth novel in this now-classic series. In it, Robinson tells the story of John Ames Boughton, the prodigal son of Gilead's Presbyterian minister, and his...
Author
Description
"Everyone has a secret they'll do anything to hide... Twenty-five years ago, the body of sixteen-year-old Eve Knox was found in the caves near her home in small-town Grotto, Iowa -- discovered by her best friend, Maggie, and her sister, Nola. There were a handful of suspects, including her boyfriend, Nick, but without sufficient evidence the case ultimately went cold. For decades Maggie was haunted by Eve's death and that horrible night. Now a detective...
14) Home
Author
Series
Gilead novels volume 2
Description
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack--the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years--comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.
Author
Description
As children, they formed a special bond growing up in the small town of Ames, Iowa. As young women, they moved to eight different states yet managed to maintain an extraordinary friendship that would carry them through college and careers, marriage and motherhood, dating and divorce, the death of a child, and the mysterious death of the eleventh member of their group. Their remarkable story is a testament to the power of friendship.
Author
Pub. Date
[2018]
Physical Desc
332 pages ; 24 cm
Description
"Benjamin Lorn, sensitive son of an embittered Civil War veteran, comes of age in the tiny Iowa town of Perpetua where, in a single summer, he mourns the recent loss of his mother, falls in love, and uncovers a shameful family secret that sends him fleeing west. Tormented with this new knowledge, Benjamin seeks transcendence through the telegraph wires that have enchanted him since boyhood. Meanwhile the weight of a dark duty grows more and more pressing....
18) A thousand acres
Pub. Date
c1997
Physical Desc
1 videodisc (106 min.) : sd., col. ; 4 3/4 in.
Description
Follows the saga of the Cook family. Cook's kingdom is a fertile farm that spans 1,000 acres, but the seeds of its destruction are sown when the patriarch, Larry Cook, impulsively decides to distribute it among his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline.
19) Ticket to ride
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2009
Physical Desc
xii, 225 p. ; 24 cm.
Description
Struggling with his father's illness and the end of a relationship, small-town Iowa lawyer Sam McCain witnesses the return of his community's first Vietnam casualty while reuniting with old friends at a Labor Day party that is shattered by a double murder.
20) Pacific: a novel
Author
Formats
Description
A story alternating between Iowa and Los Angeles follows Joan Gower, a mother who deserted her family but wants a second chance with her son, Micah, who moves with her to L.A. and has trouble adjusting to its fast and furious life of excess.
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