Central Skagit Library District

In Avenue of Mysteries, Juan Diego--a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico--has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what's coming--specifically, her own future and her brother's. Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn't know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your...

From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a schoolteacher, who has been forced to retire at sixty-one, coming to terms with the final phase of his life.

"Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher--for that world or ours." -- Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident...

In grief support groups, women and men gain strength by sharing their stories with others who have felt the same pain. For baker Sage Singer, mourning the death of her mother, that sharing brought not only healing; but also an unexpected friend. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. One day, he asks Sage for a favor. He wants her to kill him, and he tells his story to explain why. Sage then wonders, could he be...

"Hendrik Groen may be old, but he is far from dead and isn't planning to be buried any time soon. Granted, his daily strolls are getting shorter because his legs are no longer willing and he has to visit his doctor more than he'd like. Technically speaking he is...elderly. But surely there is more to life at his age than weak tea and potted geraniums? Hendrik sets out to write an expose©: a year in the life of his care home in Amsterdam, revealing...

In a rural Kentucky river town, "Old Jack" Beechum, a retired farmer, sees his life again through the shades of one burnished day in September 1952. Bringing the earthiness of America's past to mind, The Memory of Old Jack conveys the truth and integrity of the land and the people who live from it. Through the eyes of one man can be seen the values Americans strive to recapture as we arrive at the next century. - Back cover.

"An unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly old man and a desperate young woman delivers a funny and uplifting message about the power of human connection and how it's never too late to be the person you wanted to be. Eighty-eight-year-old Duffy Sinclair wants the last leg of his bachelor life to be strictly predictable, so Centennial Assisted Living is perfect: low-sodium meals, off-key sing-alongs, and the company of his best pal and roommate,...

The Sigma Protocol, a new breakneck novel of intrigue, conspiracy, and terrifying deception. American investment banker Ben Hartman arrives in Zurich for a ski holiday, the first time he's been back to Switzerland since his twin brother died there in a tragic accident four years earlier. But his arrival in Zurich triggers something far more sinister than his brother's fate. When Ben chances upon Jimmy Cavanaugh, an old college friend, Cavanaugh promptly...

"A visionary and deeply moving novel centered around former newspaperman Sam Cunningham as he prepares to die, Late City covers much of the early twentieth century, unfurling as a conversation between the dying man and a surprising God. As the two review Sam's life, from his childhood in the American South and his time in the French trenches during World War I to a newspaper career in Chicago in the Roaring Twenties and the decades that follow, moments...