San Antonio College Library

A young boy deals with the loss of his beloved cat Charlie, eventually accepting the arrival of another, very different cat.

A gripping and moving new collection of stories that reimagines the meaning of loss-- through often unexpected and violent means.

Tells the lives of five people who come together in post-9/11 Afghanistan. Marcus, an English doctor whose progressive, outspoken Afghani wife was murdered by the Taliban, opens his home--itself an eerily beautiful monument to his losses--to the others: Lara, from St. Petersburg, looking for evidence of her soldier brother who disappeared decades before during the Soviet invasion; David, an American, a former spy who has seen his ideals turned inside...

"Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt (her second), National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral new collection. In Fine Just the Way It Is, she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate." "Proulx's...

Following an accident that ended the lives of his family, a novelist struggles with survivor's guilt and writer's block while limiting his human contacts to a Kurdish neighbor and a woman he glimpses in a flat across the road.

"Every summer Isak Lövenstad gathers his three daughters by different wives to the windswept Baltic island of Hammarsö. Here Erika, Laura, and Molly know, if only for the season, what it is to be a family, and here, in the society of children, each undergoes the rites of growing up." However, one summer, Erika's bond with a local boy precipitates an incident that forever changes their lives and alters their family. "Twenty-five years later the three...

The changing world of modern-day Ireland forms the backdrop to the story of three very different people, each confronting a crossroad in his or her life--thirty-eight-year-old Ellen, escaping a failed marriage and Dublin to recapture her magical youth in Ballindoon; her uncle Matt, a local farmer; and Beatrice, a widow recovering from the suicide of her elder son.

The powerful and searing novel of three lives fractured by a civil war For ten years, Norma has been the voice of consolation for a people broken by violence. She hosts Lost City Radio, the most popular program in their nameless South American country, gripped in the aftermath of war. Every week, the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios listen as she reads the names of those who have gone missing, those whom the furiously expanding...

"A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog. When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in...

"A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces--death, violence, estrangement--come...