Central Skagit Library District

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The debut novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge evokes a teenager's alienation from her distant mother, and a parent's rage at the discovery of her daughter's sexual secrets.

“A novel of shining integrity and humor, about the bravery and hard choices of what is called ordinary life.”—Alice Munro, Nobel Prize-winning author

Before there was Olive...

The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.
The agency of revelation is the school literary contest,...

NATIONAL BESTELLER • The New York Times bestselling author of Monogomy brings us a "tasteful, elegant, sensuous" (The Boston Globe) novel about marriage and forgiveness.

Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia—wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton—is...

For Annie Barnes, going home to Middle River means dealing with truths long hidden. But it is a journey she knows she must take if she is to put to rest, once and for all, her misgivings about her mother's recent death. To an outsider, Middle River is a picture-perfect New Hampshire town. But Annie grew up there, and she knows all its secrets - just like her idol, Grace Metalious, author of the infamous novel Peyton Place, which laid a small town's...

"When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave--only to discover that the...

Twenty years after being banished from Winthrop Island, Miranda Schuyler returns to find justice for the man she once loved. Summer, 1951. Miranda Schuyler's mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on Winthrop Island overlooks the famous lighthouse. Isobel Fisher, Miranda's new stepsister, is eager to draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop society. Miranda finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas, whose father keeps the lighthouse. Joseph...

Preparing for a family birthday celebration over a 1976 Labor Day weekend spent at Martha's Vineyard, Fern and Edgar discover that Fern's inheritance has suddenly run dry, prompting the couple to engage in reckless affairs while their children are left for days at a time without guardians.

"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...

A new teacher at a New England prep school ignites a gender war--with deadly consequences--in this provocative novel. What do you love? What do you hate? What do you want? It starts with this simple writing prompt from Alex Witt, Stonebridge Academy's new creative writing teacher. When the students' answers raise disturbing questions of their own, Ms. Witt knows there's more going on the school than the faculty wants to see. She soon learns about...