Central Skagit Library District

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix's children's school. Josie has been listening to Alix's podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series....

"A haunting collection of short fiction from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club, A Head Full of Ghosts, and The Cabin at the End of the World."--Provided by publisher.

"A struggling playwright--Holly Sherwin--her musician girlfriend, and a few friends find a creepy old mansion on an isolated hill from which to rehearse Holly's most ambitious play. Ignoring the red flags about the house and setting, the friends soon find themselves fighting each other--and the house itself."--

"Set against a high-society Shanghai wedding, a heartfelt, funny, dazzling novel about a reluctant bride and her two best friends, each with their own motives and fed up with the way society treats women, who forge a plan to steal all the gift money on the big day."--Provided by publisher.

"Bob Comet is a retired librarian, isolated but not lonely, living out his quiet days in a mint-colored house in Oregon...One morning, out on his daily walk, he performs an act of kindness that brings him into contact with a nearby senior center, where he soon begins volunteering. Here, as a community of peers and friends gathers around Bob,... the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet's plain facade is...

"A woman moves from the place of her birth to a remote northern country to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has just left him. The youngest child of many siblings--more than she cares to remember --from earliest childhood she has attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion. Soon after she arrives, a series of unfortunate events occurs--collective bovine...

Jolyon Chadwick, despite long odds, has become a veritable success story. He's a famous television presenter, and the company that he started is thriving despite his mother Maria's disdain for the project. Now Maria, who abandoned Jolyon and his father long ago, has been widowed from her second marriage and returns to ask forgiveness for her transgressions. Can Jolyon trust her motives? Does she really want a relationship with her son, or does she...

Invited by a reclusive mystery novelist to help draft his life story, a longtime correspondent and detective fiction expert finds herself in a real whodunnit when she learns the writer's first wife and son mysteriously vanished.

"The year is 1998. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is a lonely American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. Through Bunny's bemused eyes, we watch global interests flock to her temporary backyard for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hearing rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age--from Baku to...

'Honey, I just want you to have everything you ever wanted.' That's what Jacy's mum always told her. And Jacy felt like she finally did. Newly married and with a baby on the way, Jacy and her new husband, Jed, embark on their first road trip together to visit his father, Dr Ash, in Michigan's far-flung Upper Peninsula. The moment they arrive in the cosy cottage in the lush woods, Jacy feels bathed in love by the warm and hospitable Dr Ash, if less...