Ruby Sisson Library

Cleaner Janice knows that it is in people's stories that you really get to know them. From recently-widowed Fiona and her son Adam; to opera-singing Geordie; and the awful Mrs 'YeahYeahYeah' and her fox terrier, Decius, Janice has a unique insight into the community around her. When Janice starts cleaning for Mrs B - a shrewd and tricksy woman in her nineties - she finally meets someone who wants to hear her story. But Janice is clear: she is the...

"A dynamic, gripping collection of short stories from "America's best novelist" (Denver Post), the New York Times-bestselling James Lee Burke. Harbor Lights is a story collection from one of the most popular and widely acclaimed icons of American fiction, featuring a never-before-published novella. These eight stories move from the marshlands on the Gulf of Mexico to the sweeping plains of Colorado to prisons, saloons, and trailer parks across the...

As a science journalist with a regular column in Scientific American, Jeremy Marsh specializes in debunking the supernatural and has a real nose for the strange and unusual. A born skeptic, he travels to the small town of Boone Creek, North Carolina, determined to find the real cause behind the ghostly apparitions that appear in the town cemetery. What he doesn't plan on, however, is meeting and falling hopelessly in love with Lexie Darnell, granddaughter...

If you like SMALL ADMISSIONS by Amy Poepell or CLASS MOM by Laurie Gelman you will love this novel about super mommies, private schools, and getting your worst moment plastered across the internet. Her mommy meltdown is seen around the world! When Quinn Barrett's son refuses to wear his hand-crafted costume to the Little Wonders Preschool Happy Halloween Parade and Dance Party she loses it -- complete with stomping, screaming, and costume-destruction...

"Necktie Party" they called it-a quick and easy form of frontier justice. The hard-eyed cattleman named Price, leader of the lynch party, looked up at the hanging tree and knew it would serve his murderous purpose. He jerked the lasso tight around the boy's neck. The two other riders, younger even than the one they were about to hang, looked sick. "Get set to kick his horse out from under him," Price ordered. Then Laramie stepped out of the willows,...

""Molly conceived a resentment against the rich cattleman who could impose such restrictions and embitter the lives of poor people. And as for Traft's tenderfoot nephew, who had come out of Missouri to run a hard outfit and build barbed-wire fences, Molly certainly hated him." Although he doesn't know cattle or cowboys, Missourian Jim Traft finds himself as the foreman of a tough Arizona outfit tasked with fencing a hundred miles of open cattle range....

Dar Williams has made her career not in stadiums, but touring America's small towns. She has played their venues, composed in their coffee shops, and drunk in their bars. She has seen these communities struggle, but also seen them thrive in the face of postindustrial identity crises.Here, Williams muses on why some towns flourish while others fail, examining elements from the significance of history and nature to the uniting power of public spaces...

"On All Souls Day, the late Marcus Conway returns home. Solar Bones captures in a single relentless sentence the life and death of this rural Irish engineer, and his place in the globally interconnected 21st century. The book takes in local municipal failures and global financial collapse, the quotidian pleasures of family, ancient history and the latest headlines, the living and the dead. A vital, tender, acerbic, warm, and death-haunted work one...

A rancher having 6000 head of cattle to get to market hires two gangs that hate each other. He figures each gang will not let the other rustle the cattle. Tex arrives looking for the man that killed his wife and took his horses. Finding his horses he joins the gang that are now riding them.

Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irrerparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that shes decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds....