Orem Library

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves,...

Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, can't save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his "prayer log". Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, troll America's highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. Spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore,...

Named the guardian of her murdered sister's troubled twins, Luce struggles to build a family with the children before being targeted by the twins' father--her sister's killer--who believes that the children are in possession of a stolen cache of money.

"Jones's sense of place is acute, and his passion for the landscape-for its colors, its creatures, its textures, its scents-is absolutely magnetic."-Sarah Waters "A dark, tense, and vital short novel. Profound, powerful, and utterly absorbing."-The Guardian" It is a book about the essentials: life and death, cruelty and compassion. It is a book that will get in your bones, and haunt you."-Daily Telegraph" Cynan Jones's fourth novel, The Dig, is an...

The murder of Beau Boutan in the compound of a backwoods Louisiana plantation sparks an orgy of local confession. Everyone, from the plantation's white owner, Candy Marshall, to more than a dozen old black men, gathered with recently-fired shotguns, claims to have fired the fatal shot, and prepares to defend themselves against the Boutan family's expected act of vengeance.

When 14-year-old William Kamkwamba's Malawi village was hit by a drought in 2001, everyone's crops began to fail. His family didn't have enough money for food, let alone school, so William spent his days in the library. He came across a book on windmills and figured out how to build a windmill that could bring electricity to his village. Several years later he figured out how to use the windmill for irrigation purposes.

"For her award-winning breakthrough film, director Gillian Armstrong drew on teenage author Miles Franklin's novel, a celebrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australian coming-of-age story, to brashly upend the conventions of period romance. Headstrong young Sybylla Melvyn (Judy Davis, in a star-making performance) bemoans her stifling life in the backcountry where her writerly ambitions receive little encouragement, and craves independence over...

Set in the magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Thomas Hardy's early work, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is unique among his great novels for the intense feeling that he lavished upon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy poured all of his profound empathy for both humanity and the rhythms of natural life into this story of her beauty, goodness, and tragic fate. In so doing, he created a character who, like Emma Bovary and Anna...