Conejos Library District

For use in schools and libraries only. While jogging along the Cape Cod shore, a single mother recovering from a difficult divorce stumbles upon a bottle containing a love letter that sends her on an odyssey of self-discovery, renewal, and the possibility of new love.

After spending her life with her mentally retarded mother and agoraphobic neighbor, twelve-year-old Heidi sets out from Reno, Nevada, to New York to find out who she is. Living with her mentally disabled mother who only knows just over twenty words, young Heidi has learned to live in her special world until a new word is suddenly used and repeated by her mother; causing Heidi to think it might be a key to a secret past about which she knows so little....

"A woman aspiring to a contemplative life faces innumerable obstacles-cultural, financial, sexual, and metaphysical-that stand between her and the freedom to live as she desires"--

An awkward misfit in an accomplished Boston family, Isadora Peabody yearns to escape her social isolation and sneaks aboard the Silver Swan, bound for Rio, leaving it all behind. Ryan Calhoun, too, had a good family name. But he'd purposely walked away from everything it afforded him. Driven by his quest to right an old wrong, the fiery, temperamental sea captain barely registers the meek young woman who comes aboard his ship. To the Swan's motley...

"Casey's feeling empowered as she prepares to graduate from high school. But her quick tongue and rebellious nature become her downfall as she's swallowed up into the Cobalt Domain, another dimension full of ferocious creatures and an even more dangerous ruler. There are rules to survival in the Colbalt Domain, a place in which no one intends to end up and few ever escape" -- from back cover.

"...a novel of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious...

This collection of interconnected stories begins with the anarchist daughter of missionaries in Manhattan who runs away to be an activist and ends with a wealthy young adulterer in Paris who is outsmarted by the object of his desire.

Pittsburgh area college professor Michael Douglas faces a slew of crises as he struggles to complete the follow-up to his successful first novel. His wife has left him, his lover--the wife of his department's head--is pregnant, a student boarder is in love with him, and a troubled young writer sees Douglas as a mentor.