Cranston Public Library

"From the beloved author of Dominicana, a GMA Book Club Pick and Women's Prize Finalist, an electrifying and indelible new novel about a woman who has lost everything but the chance to finally tell her story. Write this down: Cara Romero wants to work. Cara Romero thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when, in her mid-50s, she loses her job in the Great Recession, she is forced back into the job market...

"Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn't have much to look forward to. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, by her predatory landlord, by the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around. He offers her a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral...

The third in Trollope's six-volume Palliser series, The Eustace Diamonds boasts an extraordinary heroine in Lizzie Eustace, a lying schemer in the mould of Thackeray's Becky Sharp. A pompous Under-Secretary of State, an exploitative and acquisitive American and her unhappy "niece," a shady radical peer, and a brutal aristocrat are only some of the characters in this, one of Trollope's most engaging novels: part sensation fiction, part detective story,...

Explores the pitfalls of financial worry, the wages of greed and the God who has promised to be a refuge from both. Autographed copy.

The bestselling novel that became an Oscar-winning film starring Elizabeth Taylor about New York's speakeasy generation
A masterpiece of American fiction and a bestseller upon its publication in 1935, BUtterfield 8 lays bare with brash honesty the unspoken and often shocking truths that lurked beneath the surface of a society still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression. One Sunday morning, Gloria wakes up in a stranger's...

"1812: A Christmas in paradise: To save nurse Laura Ortiz from destitution, British naval surgeon Thomas Wilkie offers her a marriage of convenience." -- "1855: O Christmas tree: A generation later, Thomas and Laura's daughter Lillian, a widowed mother, works as a nurse in the Crimea, and Christmas seems far away until Major Trey Wharton helps create a festive sparkle." -- "1877: No crib for a bed: Lillian's son Captain Wilkie Wharton is makes a...

"Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers--primarily women--who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and...

Roberts's novel traces the coming of age of Ellen Chesser, the daughter of a poor itinerant farmer. Against all privations and the forces that would subdue her, Ellen is sustained by a sense of wonder and by an awareness of her own being. Reduced to the bare elements of life, her world becomes a ceremony of daily duties that bind her to the natural world and her family. "The Time of Man" stands as a beautifully written tribute to the human spirit

The incomparable USA Today bestseller Samanth James cordially invites you to Regency England for a Sterling affair . . . Perfectly Marvelous Devon St. James must surely be dreaming! She closes her eyes in London's poorest slum, and awakens wrapped in fine linens . . . staring into the eyes of the most gorgeous man she has ever seen! Sebastian Sterling, marquess of Thurston, is clearly shocked to have a girl from the streets in his bed, though the...

Guadalupe Magdalena Molina Vásquez -- wife, scoundrel, courtesan, mother -- is full of contradictions: she believes in love but is suspicious of men; she rejects religion but admires the Virgin Mary; she respects tradition while breaking all the rules. Here, in the Golden Zone of Teatán, Mexico, Magda tells her extraordinary life story -- from a poor Mexican barrio to American affluence, from wide-eyed childhood to worldly courtesan life, from full-blooded...