Cranston Public Library

"I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lacking (everything she cooks tastes of soap) and she attributes...

A summer visit to a friend's English estate lands a young man in hot water when he falls for his host's older sister and becomes embroiled in a dangerous game.

George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate that bears a striking resemblance to Time, Inc. in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. Things happen. The next day Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her off at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip....

"'What's new. What else. What next. What's happened here.' Pitch Dark, Renata Adler's follow-up to her prizewinning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affair with a married lover, a fraught relationship that reverberates throughout the novel, as it moves from Kate's house in rural Connecticut...

"Los Angeles in the late 1940s is a city of promise and prosperity, but not for former fighter pilot Dix Steele. To his mind nothing has come close to matching 'that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneness in the sky.' He prowls the foggy city night -- Ưbus stops and stretches of darkened beaches and movie houses just emptying out -- seeking solitary young women. His funds are running out and his frustrations are growing....

A tender story about three sisters coming of age in Greece over the course of three summers, now available after being out of print for over twenty years. Three Summers is the story of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a big old house surrounded by a beautiful garden are Maria, the oldest sister, as sexually bold as she is eager to settle down and have a family of her own; beautiful but...

"To become a nun in the fourteenth century was often a business transaction rather than a spiritual calling; it is small wonder, then, that the inhabitants of the Benedictine convent of Oby are prey to worldly ambitions, frustrations, pleasures and jealousies. An outbreak of the Black Death the collapse of the convent spire and a disappearance are the dramas that strike this cloistered community, which is brought vividly to life in Sylvia Townsend...

Pinocchio, a wooden puppet full of tricks and mischief, with a talent for getting into and out of trouble, wants more than anything else to become a real boy.

"Chronicles the author's experience of taming a goshawk named Gos with almost no guidance, describing the contest of wills, sleep deprivation, and trial and error that leads to a relationship between a man and the wild."--

This is the big novel that some day was bound to some day come out of our proud Western tradition. It is the story of a lonely marshal who was as much outside the law as the terrorists he was hired to destroy, and of the town he tried to rid of violence. Drawing on events known to have happened on the Southwest frontier of the 1880s, Oakley Hall not only has brought to life one of the most vivid periods of out national history, but has done it with...