San Antonio College Library

The reef is about a romance between a widow and her former lover. The novel takes place in Paris and rural France, but primarily features American characters. Anna Leath lives in France and discovers that George Darrow, the man she is about to marry has had an affair with her daughter's governess. Darrow has had a brief liaison with the delicate, generous Sophy Viner, a kind woman of the working class. She later meets Anna's stepson Owen Leath, who...

In this funny and chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and the subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease. When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself...

"Watch your brother," Beth Cappadora tells Vincent, 7. Five minutes later she returns, "Where is Ben?" It is the moment every parent fears and it arrives to a mother of three in Chicago. The novel follows the family as year after year the hope of finding Ben recedes. Nine years later a boy knocks on their door looking for lawn work. It can't be. It is.

Praised as "a deeply felt, deeply moving tale ... chilling and finely tuned" (Publishers Weekly), Susan Palwick's first novel Flying in Place won widespread acclaim for its haunting exploration of a troubled childhood. Now, after a decade, Palwick returns with the powerful tale of a family cast out of an idyllic realm, learning to live in our own troubled world--an exciting and insightful examination of humanity in the spirit of Ursula Le Guin's The...

A collection of short stories following the lives of single women and wives during various phases of midlife deals with the themes of time and change as it addresses such topics as the Iraq war and a smoker's reprieve from death by lung cancer.

"A sweeping, unforgettable novel fromThe New York Times best-selling author of Maine, about the hope, sacrifice, and love between two sisters and the secret that drives them apart. Nora and Theresa Flynn are twenty-one and seventeen when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by...

Fresh from cooking school, Tom Feather and Cathy Scarlet are talented additions to the Dublin scene with their new catering company, but some people in the city, including their families, are not so keen on the idea of their success.

When the McPheron brothers see Victoria Roubideaux, the single mother they'd taken in, move from their ranch to begin college, an emptiness opens before them and for many other townspeople it also promises to be a long, hard winter.

In the border town of El Paso--better known to its Mexican American residents as El Chuco--dramas unfold in humdrum households every day as working-class men come home from their jobs and their wives and children do their best to cope with life. Christine Granados now plumbs the heart of this community in fourteen startling stories, uncovering the dreams and secrets in which ordinary people sometimes lose themselves. Many fictional accounts of barrio...