Burlington Public Library

Three women reunite after 25 years and realize that their lives are unfulfilled. Magically they are given the chance to relive any three months they choose.

The highlight of Sarah Orne Jewett's career was The Country of the Pointed Firs, a tightly crafted narrative of a summer visit to a small town on the coast of Maine. The narrator is a writer who comes to the fictional town of Dunnet Landing in search of solitude but instead finds herself drawn into the town's rhythms. She's adopted into a loose-knit group of women who tell stories about the town and the people who inhabit it.

The story begins in the 1950s, in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. Growing up on these tough streets the two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else. As they grow, as their paths repeatedly diverge and converge, Elena and Lila remain best friends whose respective destinies are reflected and refracted in the other. They are likewise the embodiments of a nation undergoing momentous change. Through...

Balancing her roles as wife and mother with the responsibility of caring for a parent who is recovering from a stroke, Laura reads the love letters exchanged by her parents during the 1950s and tumultuous Vietnam War period, a correspondence that reveals unexpected truths.

In trendy Silicon Valley, Priya has everything she needs; a loving husband, a career, and a home. But the one thing she wants most is the child she's unable to have. In a Southern Indian village, Asha doesn't have much. She and her husband can barely keep a tin roof over their heads. But she wants a better education for her gifted son. Pressured by her family, Asha reluctantly checks into the Happy Mothers House: a baby farm where she can rent...

"Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by award-winning director Guillermo del Toro. Filmmaker and longtime horror literature fan Guillermo del Toro serves as the curator for the Penguin Horror series, a new collection of classic tales and poems by masters of the genre. Included here are some of del Toro's favorites, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Ray Russell's short story "Sardonicus," considered by Stephen...

"Told entirely through the transcripts of the narrator's psychiatric sessions, this intimate portrait of grief and longing follows twenty-year-old Alicia Western as she, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, contemplates the nature of madness, her hallucinations and her own existence in 1972 Black River Falls, Wisconsin"--

The beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson's story is told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.

In this tightly wound, enthralling story reminiscent of Agatha Christie's works, Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo's stay is nothing but pleasant:...