Kiowa County Public Library District

For years Sarah Lindeman, now in her 80s, has carried out a special tradition over the 12 days of Christmas. On her small plastic Yuletide tree she hangs an ornament each day. Then she sings her song and reflects on her life's true love. This year, Sarah notices a young nurse listening, and in her recognizes pain and longing. Sarah prays that through her story, she can ease this young woman's sorrow and help her realize the importance of God's gift...

Reverend John Ames is dying in 1956 in Gilead, Iowa, and he in recording his family's story. Glory Boughton has returned to care for her dying father and soon her brother, Jack, the prodigal son, comes home, too.

Lily is haunted by memories--of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness. In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu ("women's writing"). They painted letters...

From Taylor Jenkins Reid, "a genius when it comes to stories about life and love" (Redbook), comes an unforgettable and sweeping novel about one classic film actress's relentless rise to the top, the risks she took, the loves she lost, and the long-held secrets the public could never imagine. Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown...

An old man reminisces about his first love, a young runaway who taught him more about life than anyone had before or since.

"Tom Johnson has just turned eighty-five. When faced with a nursing home, he escapes to the Netherlands to find the woman he fell in love with during World War II. His children want him back, but Tom fights to stay in the Netherlands for love, family and all the remaining rights of an old man"--

"An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer's time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming,...

Stumped by a magazine assignment to write about his own uneventful life, a man visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. Reluctantly, his grandfather commences a story that will take him almost a week to tell: an odyssey of two young men determined to survive, against desperate odds, a mission in which cold, hunger, and the Russian authorities prove as dangerous as the invading...

In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forge a relationship that binds them for more than three decades.

In a novel that moves back and forth between the Soviet Union during World War II and modern-day America, Marina, an elderly Russian woman, recalls vivid images of her youth during the height of the siege of Leningrad.