Helen Plum Library

"What happens when best friends with nothing in common come together, fall apart, and fall in love? The Vacationers meets When Harry Met Sally..., from the author of Beach Read When Poppy met Alex, there was no spark, no chemistry, and no reason to think they'd ever talk again. Alex is quiet, studious, and destined for a future in academia. Poppy is a wild child who only came to U of Chicago to escape small-town life. But after sharing a ride home...

Prof. Brandt Savage--grandson of the legendary action hero--is forced into a top-secret training program where he discovers his true calling...as the perfect assassin. Dr. Brandt Savage is on sabbatical from the University of Chicago. Instead of doing solo fieldwork in anthropology, the gawky, bespectacled PhD finds himself enrolled in a school where he is the sole pupil. His professor, "Meed," is demanding. She's also his captor. Savage emerges...

A mind-bending, relentlessly paced science-fiction thriller, in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious--and awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes,...

"When a woman alone in the world bravely chooses to open her heart, two lost souls have a new chance at belonging, in this intimate novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber. A new beginning in charming Oceanside, Washington is exactly what Hope Godwin needs after the death of her twin brother. There are plenty of distractions, like her cozy cottage with the slightly nosy landlords next door, and a brewing drama among her students...

"Colin Hancock is giving his second chance his best shot. At 28, he's focused only on walking a straight line - getting his teaching degree, working out at the gym religiously, and avoiding all the places and people that proved so destructive in his earlier life. The last thing he's looking for is a serious relationship. But when Maria Sanchez crosses paths with him on a rainswept night in North Carolina, his plans are upended in a way that will rattle...

Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history--performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life. So Tom moves back to London, his old home, to become a high school history teacher--the perfect job for someone who has witnessed the city's...

"Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red blooded original. When she's not onstage, we look forward to her return..."* And now, indeed, Olive Kitteridge has returned, as indomitable as ever. "It turns out--I just wasn't done with Olive," said Strout. "It was like she kept poking me in the ribs, so I finally said 'Okay, okay...'" Now Olive returns, this time as a person getting older, navigating her next decade...

With his life constantly in flux as he lives through many historic upheavals, Roland Baines, haunted by lost opportunities, searches for comfort through music, literature, friends, sex, politics and love, struggling against global events beyond his control that have shaped his existence and memories When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War, eleven-year-old Roland Baines is stranded at a boarding school. His vulnerability...

"In the early 1900s, a curmudgeonly professor journeys to a small town to study faerie folklore, where she discovers dark fae magic, friendship, and love. Cambridge professor Emily Wilde is good at many things: She is the foremost expert on dryadology, the study of faeries. She is a genius scholar and a meticulous researcher who is writing the world's first encylopedia of faerie lore. But Emily Wilde is not good at people. She could never make small...

2000: Bright, ambitious fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017: Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa. Now Vanessa finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how...