Helen Plum Library

"A retired bestselling author hosts a one-of-a-kind competition, with high risks and high rewards-giving the winner a chance to change lives. Lucy Hart has come a long way since feeling the cold neglect of her parents, whose attention always centered around her chronically ill sister's needs. Now a twenty-six-year-old teacher's aide, Lucy is able to share her love of books with bright, young students, and one in particular, a seven-year-old orphan...

"For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction...

In Lisa Genova's extraordinary New York Times bestselling novel, an accomplished woman slowly loses her thoughts and memories to Alzheimer's disease—only to discover that each day brings a new way of living and loving. Now a major motion picture starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, and Kristen Stewart!
Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor...

"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...

"Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--Publisher description (January 2007)

"Louisiana, 1875: In the tumultuous aftermath of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now-destitute plantation; Juneau Jane, her illegitimate free-born Creole half-sister; and Hannie, Lavinia's former slave. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following dangerous roads rife with ruthless vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war...

"Stephen King's HOLLY marks the triumphant return of beloved King character Holly Gibney. Readers have witnessed Holly's gradual transformation from a shy and reclusive (but also brave and ethical) homebody in Mr. Mercedes to Bill Hodges's partner in Finders Keepers and End of Watch to a full-fledged, smart and occasionally tough private detective on her own in The Outsider and If It Bleeds. In this new novel, Holly once again claims the spotlight,...

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,...

Seven fifth-graders at Snow Hill School in Connecticut relate how their lives are changed for the better by "rookie teacher" Mr. Terupt

"USA Today bestselling author Samantha Downing teaches all the wrong lessons in her latest sneaky thriller about a calculating teacher in a privileged private school who knows he has the power to make or break your kid's future...and he uses it.... Teddy Crutcher has just won Teacher of the Year at the prestigious Belmont Academy, home to the best and brightest. He says his wife couldn't be more proud--though no one has seen her in a while. But Teddy...