Ruby Sisson Library

"For Amy Fairfield, the family orchard is more than a business. With its blossom-scented air and rows of trees framed by the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains, it's her heritage and her future. But right now, it's also a headache. Putting a painful breakup behind her, Amy has come home to help revitalize Fairfield Orchard. She doesn't have time for the handsome -- distracting -- professor who wants to dig into her family's history for his research....

This epic tale of loyalty and betrayal spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carr fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.

"Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an...

Resigning himself to a life of regrets with a heavily dependent wife whose neuroses were exacerbated by his infidelity, English professor Tom Putnam hopes for renewal through a new friendship, only to learn that his former mistress bore him a son a decade earlier.

In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and with Britain on the brink of economic ruin, a young English couple takes a tennis vacation in Antigua. There they meet Dima, a Russian who styles himself the world's number one money launderer, who wants, among other things, a game of tennis. Back in London, the couple is subjected to an all-night interrogation by the British Secret Service, which also needs their help. Their acquiescence will lead...

Set in 1953, Katherine Watson is a free-spirited graduate of UCLA who accepts a teaching post at Wellesley College, a women-only school where the students are torn between the repressive mores of the time and their longing for intellectual freedom.

A middle-aged anthropology professor contemplating his future becomes romantically involved with a woman released from jail after shooting her husband, the pastor of a snake-handling church.

"On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning toward tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new,...

"Claire Caspian is a first-rate professor, teaching even the most cynical student to find beauty in literature. But with her own personal story, she isn't as successful. Having recently lost her husband, Claire returns with her young son to the tiny desert town of Romeo, Colorado, where she grew up. There she settles in with her feisty old Abuelita, the richest woman in the county and attempts to rebuild her life. But love comes searching for Claire...

"As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for her incapacitated...