Central Skagit Library District

Reuniting in Big Sur to honor a decades-old pact to throw each other living "funerals," celebrations to remind themselves life is worth living--and living well--five friends find their pact upended when one of them reveals a shocking secret.

Tony Webster has always made the very reasonable assumption that he could trust his memories, but when he's forced to revisit his past, everything he believes about himself and his life is challenged. The fact is that Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, never gave much thought to his past at all until his closest childhood friends' return with a vengeance -- one of them from the grave and another maddeningly present. Tony thought he'd left all this uncertainly...

Daunted by the singular sexual tastes and dark secrets of the beautiful, tormented young entrepreneur Christian Grey, Anastasia Steele has broken off their relationship to start a new career with a Seattle publishing house.

"From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a shocking and tender novel about a young woman's efforts to sustain a state of deep hibernation over the course of a year on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her...

A group of international guests, taken hostage by terrorists while attending a birthday party at the home of the vice president of a small South American country, form bonds with their captors and enter into an almost idyllic lifestyle, united by the music of Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano.

A chance encounter with a handsome banker in a jazz bar on New Year's Eve 1938 catapults Wall Street secretary Katey Kontent into the upper echelons of New York society, where she befriends a shy multi-millionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow.

"[A] novel of a family riven by fortune, an ex-wife driven psychotic with jealousy, a battle royal fought through couture gown sabotage, and the heir to one of Asia's greatest fortunes locked out of his inheritance" -- provided by publisher. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on the massive fortune of Su Yi, their matriarch. With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park-- a trophy estate...

"When young, pretty Catherine Bailey meets Lee Brightman, she can't believe her luck. Gorgeous, charismatic, and a bit mysterious, Lee seems almost too perfect to be true. But what begins as flattering attention and spontaneous, passionate sex transforms into raging jealousy, and Catherine soon discovers that Lee's dazzling blue eyes and blond good looks hide a dark, violent nature. ... Increasingly isolated and driven into the darkest corner of her...

The richest, wisest, funniest, and most moving novel in years from Don Delillo, one of the great American novelists of our time-- an ode to language, the heart of our humanity; a meditation on death and an embrace of life. Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a George Soros-like billionaire now in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a deeply remote and secret compound where death is controlled...

At a fork in the road of life, Dan Porter had it all: a big house in suburban London, a beautiful wife, three children in private school, and a high-paying job. But then, it all collapsed like a house of cards.