Catalog Search Results

Lucille Howard is getting on in years, but she stays busy. Thanks to the inspiration of her dearly departed friend Arthur Truluv, she has begun to teach baking classes, sharing the secrets to her delicious classic Southern yellow cake, the perfect pinwheel cookies, and other sweet essentials. Her classes have become so popular that she's hired Iris, a new resident of Mason, Missouri, as an assistant. Iris doesn't know how to bake but she needs to...

Lordor Nordstrom created, in his wisdom, not only a lively town and a prosperous legacy for himself but also a beautiful final resting place for his family, friends, and neighbors yet to come. "Resting place" turns out to be a bit of a misnomer, however. Odd things begin to happen, and it starts the whole town talking. With her wild imagination, great storytelling, and deep understanding of folly and the human heart, the beloved Fannie Flagg tells...

"From Percival Everett-a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards-comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby...

"Alma DeGeer Dunahew, the mother of three young boys, works as the maid for a prominent citizen and his family in West Table, Missouri. Her husband is mostly absent, and, in 1929, her scandalous, beloved younger sister is one of the 42 killed in an explosion at the local dance hall. Who is to blame? Mobsters from St. Louis? The embittered local gypsies? The preacher who railed against the loose morals of the waltzing couples? Or could it have been...

The story of first love featuring Katie, 13. When her father, a widowed army colonel, moves to another town, Katie meets Jimmy, 23, a garage attendant, and she falls in love with him. Unfortunately Jimmy is married and a father, and though he likes Katie very much he is not about to leave his family. A tale of platonic love, narrated by Katie. By the author of The Pull of the Moon.

Twenty-one-year-old Jenilee Lane and her elderly neighbor, Eudora Gibson, learn how to face the future and the past, respectively, when Jenilee rescues Eudora after a tornado and then embarks on another rescue: collecting photos, letters, and other fragments scattered from her neighbors' houses during the storm.

"[A] minor classic, one that packs in vastly more life than many more serious novels do . . . A novel that tastes life at first hand; it's a palate cleanser for jaded appetites." —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"A spare, unflinching, generous and lusty masterpiece of adventure writing." —Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

A treasured cult classic following

...

"At birth, Violet and Rose Flowers were identical, save for a tiny bluish-purple mark gracing Violet's slender neck. By nineteen, their temperaments distinguish them, as different as the flowers their mother named them for - Violet, wild and outgoing, and Rose, solitary and reserved. Still, they are each other's world. Then, on a sweltering, terrible August night in 1928, an explosion rocks Lamb's Dance Hall in Possum Flats, Missouri, engulfing it...

"McCown County assistant prosecutor Elsie Arnold is prepping an assault case when a girl is found beaten and bloodied at a roadside no-tell motel. Elsie tries to convince the teen to reveal who attacked her, but Mandy is too scared--and stubborn--to cooperate ... and then she disappears. Elsie's positive a predator is targeting the Ozark hills, yet the authorities refuse to believe their small town could be plagued by sex trafficking. Then middle...

After fifteen years of growing up in the Ozark hills with his widowed mother, high-school freshman Boady Sanden is beyond ready to move on. He dreams of glass towers and cityscapes, driven by his desire to be anywhere other than Jessup, Missouri. The new kid at St. Ignatius High School, if he isn't being pushed around, he is being completely ignored. Even his beloved woods, his playground as a child and his sanctuary as he grew older, seem to be closing...