"Sloane Parker lives a small, contained life as a librarian in her small, contained town. She never thinks of herself as lonely...but still she looks forward to that time every day when old curmudgeon Arthur McLachlan comes to browse the shelves and cheerfully insult her. Their sparring is such a highlight of Sloane's day that when Arthur doesn't show up one morning, she's instantly concerned. And then another day passes, and another. Anxious, Sloane...

Lucy Hull, a young children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both a kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten- year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes with celebrity Pastor Bob. Lucy stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after...

Bored with another normal, inky evening, bats discover an open library window and fly in to enjoy the photocopier, water fountain, and especially the books and stories found there.

In a society in which books are outlawed, Montag, a regimented fireman in charge of burning the forbidden volumes, meets a revolutionary school teacher who dares to read. Suddenly he finds himself a hunted fugitive, forced to choose not only between two women, but between personal safety and intellectual freedom.

"A Indian American boy endures a family move from Hawaii to frigid Minnesota and, with the help of three life-changing books he reads in school, he learns to like reading, and ultimately, himself"--

Six chefs are preparing to compete in an outdoor tent at Storyton Hall in Virginia for prizes that will boost their careers - but is there someone who can't stand the heat? It looks that way when one of the contestants is found dead in a pantry packed with two centuries' worth of cookbooks, among other treasures and rarities. Could there be a connection to other recent events in town, like tampering with the costume of a local mascot? Jane isn't sure,...

At bedtime, a young boy who cannot find his favorite book imagines the various creatures that might have taken it from him.

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport,...

When her sister-in-law Poppy is found murdered, amateur sleuth Aurora Teagarden teams up with Poppy's boyfriend, a local police detective, to solve the case, in spite of complications caused by their own past relationship.

In a Southern nursing home, an 80-year-old man reads from his diary to his wife, suffering from Alzheimer's. It's the story of their teenage romance, followed by years of separation because he was from the wrong class, followed by her decision, on his return from World War II, to be her own woman and marry him. Set amid the austere beauty of coastal North Carolina in 1946, The Notebook begins with the story of Noah Calhoun, a rural Southerner returned...