Helen Plum Library

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated,...

In early 1940s Los Angeles, Mexican Americans Marisela and Lorena work in canneries all day, then jitterbug with sailors all night with their zoot suit wearing younger brother, Ray, as escort until the night racial violence leads to murder. Includes historical note

"Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s. It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early...

Told from multiple viewpoints, Shae Tatum, an unarmed, thirteen-year-old black girl, is shot by a white police officer, throwing their community into upheaval and making it a target of demonstrators A girl walks home from school. She's tall for her age. She's wearing her winter coat. Her headphones are in. She never makes it home. In the aftermath, while law enforcement tries to justify the response, one fact remains: a police officer has shot and...

When war arrives, the master of Beauvais Plantation, Anthony Levallois, foresees that dominion in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran's daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looks back from the 1950s on...

"Moments after her birth to the mistress of a sprawling Virginia plantation, Lisbeth Wainwright is entrusted to Mattie, an enslaved wet nurse. From then on, Mattie serves as Lisbeth's stand-in mother, nursing her, singing her to sleep, and soothing her in the night. And yet mothering Lisbeth tears Mattie away from her own baby, Samuel, who lives in the slave quarters. Growing up under Mattie's tender care, Lisbeth adopts her traditions of prayer,...

"The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. A consummate prankster with a quick wit, Tom Sawyer dreams of a bigger fate than simply being a "rich boy." Yet through the novel's humorous escapades-from the famous episode of the whitewashed fence to the trial of Injun Joe-Mark Twain explores the deeper themes of the adult world, one of dishonesty and superstition, murder and revenge,...

"The eagerly awaited novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home, a tender and haunting story of a father and daughter, crime and forgiveness, race and memory"-- When the roar of a low-flying plane awakens him in the middle of the night, Sheriff Winston Barnes knows something strange is happening at the nearby airfield on the coast of North Carolina. But nothing can prepare him for what he finds: a large airplane...

Convention doesn't carry much weight in Alder Creek. It doesn't in Amoris Westmore's family either. Daughter of a massage therapist and a pothead artist, inheritor of her grandmother's vinyl collection, and blissfully entering her senior year in high school, Amoris never wants to leave her progressive hometown. Why should she? Everything changes when Jamison Rush moves in next door. Jamison was Amoris's first crush, and their last goodbye still stings....

An aging white male college professor develops a dangerous obsession with his new Pakistani colleague in this modern, iconoclastic novel that is as powerful, riveting, and disturbing as Lolita, Disgrace, and A Little Life. Dr. Oliver Harding, a tenured professor of English, is long settled into the routines of a divorced, aging academic. But his quiet, staid life is upended by his new colleague, Ruhaba Khan, a dynamic Pakistani Muslim law professor. Ruhaba...