San Antonio College Library

"Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero--sullen, gawky Hugh Person--to Switzerland . . . As a young [American] publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R. [an eccentric author], falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride. . . . Eight years later--following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment--Hugh makes a lone sentimental...

"A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose willful ways provoke a series of transgressions that begins with adultery and ends, much to everyone's relief, in murder."--Publisher's description.

After the death of his wife, Nicholas Close becomes haunted, literally, by ghosts. Torn by guilt and fearing for his sanity, he returns home to Tallong, Australia, and becomes entangled in a disturbing series of disappearances and murders--both as a suspect and as the next victim of the malignant evil lurking in the heart of the woods.

The story of a young, recently widowed ex-Army major and architect, Hayden Chart. He strives mightily to find personal meaning in Florence. Beautiful fellow American. Olivia Lomond is a budding scholar who tempts him to make his mind grow in appreciation of art and history. But earthy, honest Roxanna Eldritch, town girl and reporter sent to Europe to cover the 1950 Holy Year in Rome, improbably wins Chart's heart in the end. Lewis was an American...

When mail-order bride Kate Whittington arrives in Texas to meet her new husband, Reed Banton, she is shocked to discover that he has never heard of her, and she becomes determined to melt the rancher's icy heart.

"In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers...

Playing on ideas about gender and power through sexual alignments, the novel offers rare feminist insight into relations between the sexes in southern society during the twenties. Ellen Glasgow takes the familiar story of the cuckold and raises it to a new level. Her sixty-five-year-old male protagonist, the recently widowed Judge Gamaliel Honeywell, falls in love with and marries an impulsive twenty-three-year-old woman, emblem of the 1920s.

In the late 1950s, in a small New England town, Reverend Tyler Caskey has suffered a terrible loss and finds it hard to be the person he once was. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family's tragedy. Tyler's usually patient and kind congregation now questions his...

Dombey is a proud man who wants most in his life to have a male heir he can pass his business on to. His wish eventually comes true, but at great cost when his wife dies during the birth of the boy. Dombey also fractures his relationship with his daughter after the death of his wife. When the son dies at a young age, Dombey must reconcile with all those who were once close to him or face a bleak future of solitude.

"An utterly stunning novel of love, loss, the insidious nature of secrets, and the enduring power of words. I Saw a Man fulfills the promise of Owen Sheers's acclaimed novel, Resistance. While on assignment in Pakistan, Caroline Turner is killed in a drone strike. Her grief-stricken husband, Michael, leaves their cottage in Wales and returns to London to try to build a new life. He quickly develops a close friendship with his neighbors, Josh and Samantha...