Deschutes Public Library

The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a- novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience.

On assignment in Vienna, photographer Ian Jarrett falls suddenly and desperately in love with a woman he has met purely by chance, Marian Esguard. Back in England, he separates from his wife and goes to meet Marian at an agreed-upon rendezvous, only to hear her tell him on the telephone that she will not be coming after all. She then vanishes from his life as mysteriously as she entered it. Searching frantically for the woman for whom he has sacrificed everything, Jarrett stumbles upon a Dorset churchyard full of gravestones of dead Esguards. He meets Daphne Sanger, a psychotherapist, who is also looking for someone: a former patient who has come to believe she is the reincarnation of Marian Esguard - a woman who lived in Regency times and, it emerges, may have invented photography ten years before Fox Talbot. But why is Marian Esguard unknown to history? And who and where is the woman Ian Jarrett met and fell in love with in Vienna?

From the bestselling author of "Chocolat" comes a sensual literary concoction of tragedy, secrets, and the relationship between a daughter and her mother. Returning to the small Loire village of her childhood to run a cafe, Franboise Dartigen soon finds that hidden among her mother's recipes are clues that will lead her to the truth of long ago.

It's 1940 and Linda Voss, secretary extraordinaire, has a secret: she's in love with her boss, John Berringer, the pride of the Ivy Leage. Not that he'd take a second look at her, a German-Jewish girl from Queens who spends her time caring for her faded beauty of a mother, and following the news of the war that is engulfing Europe. How Linda wins and loses her man, puts her life on the line for her beliefs, and finally gets the man she deserved all along is the story that only Susan Isaacs, author of the accalimed bestseller MAGIC HOUR, can tell.

Marvelously written, expertly told, The World Below captures the shadowy half-truths of the visible world, and the beauty and sorrow submerged beneath the surfaces of our lives--the lost world of the past, our lost hopes for the future. A tour de force from one of our most beloved storytellers. From the Hardcover edition.

The discovery of a dead baby under a pile of old blankets in Aaron Fisher's barn sets off a scandal in Amish country and an investigation that could implicate Fisher's eighteen-year-old daughter.

A sweeping historical from the national bestselling author of Marrying the Mistress and Other People's Children. A young woman living in a crumbling villa on the Mediterranean island of Malta endures the deprivation and devastation of wartime bombing -- and learns that while life doesn't always go as planned, neither does love....

This entrancing and deeply searching novel will touch a nerve in every reader. Celia Grinstead, 40-year-old mother of three almost-grown children, on a sudden impulse, walks away from her marriage, hitches a ride into the unknown, and settles in a strange new town. But soon after she begins her impersonal, unencumbered new life, fresh responsibilities inevitably accumulate.

When Jud Connors, a successful writer, is found murdered in his isolated cabin in the Oregon woods, his daughter, Abby, embarks on her own investigation. She soon realizes that the clue to the murderer's identity is buried in her father's latest novel.