Cranston Public Library

A realistic and emotional look at a woman battling mental illness and societal pressures written by iconic American writer Sylvia Plath.

"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." — USA Today

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented,

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A poor art student in New York City discovers a duffel bag full of diamonds in the chaos during an attack at Grand Central Station and is pursued by the Ghost, an assassin who had murdered the bag's owner.

"Never Saw Me Coming is a compulsive, voice-driven thriller by an exciting new talent in fiction that will keep you pinned to the page and rooting for a would-be killer. You should never trust a psychopath. But what if you had no choice? It would be easy to underestimate Chloe Sevre... She's a freshman honor student, a legging-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. She spends her time on yogalates, frat parties and plotting...

Ex-New Yorker Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town. Alone in the house with her infant son all day, she feels uneasy, adrift. She neglects her work, losing untold hours to her Brooklyn moms' Facebook group, her "influencer" sister's Instagram feed, and text messages with the best friend she never sees anymore. She hires Sam, a senior at the local women's college, to babysit. Sam is struggling...

Mark Darrow returns to Caldwell College 16 years after his graduation when his mentor, Lionel Farr, brings him back to become Caldwell's president. The school is still haunted by the tragic murder of Angela Hall, an African American student who was strangled and left outside the school's landmark spire. Fresh off a football victory, Mark was the one who found Angela, and it was his best friend, Steve, who was convicted of the murder. Now Caldwell...

In order to keep an eye on her half-sister, Shaylee, Julia Farentino takes a job at an elite boarding school in Oregon known for turning wayward kids around. Julia is suspicious of the school, because she knows of one student who disappeared, and has never been found. Soon she uncovers disturbing information about previous students.

Intellectually precocious high school senior Quentin Coldwater escapes the boredom of his daily life by reading and re-reading a series of beloved fantasy novels set in an enchanted land called Fillory. Like everybody else he assumes that magic isn't real - until he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York. But his childhood dream is a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart. (Bestseller)...

"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...

Joseph Geist takes a job as a "conversationalist" for a wealthy, enigmatic woman who offers him a place to stay in her big, beautiful house. But as his friendship with his employer evolves from conversationalist to lodger to caretaker, Joseph finds himself at odds with the woman's troubled nephew, and decides to do whatever is necessary to maintain his position.

Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama. Gifty is a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked...