Orem Library

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

Jess Aarons has been practicing all summer so he can be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. And he almost is, until the new girl in school, Leslie Burke, outpaces him. The two become fast friends and spend most days in the woods behind Leslie's house, where they invent an enchanted land called Terabithia. One morning, Leslie goes to Terabithia without Jess and a tragedy occurs. it will take the love of his family and the strength that Leslie has...

"As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it's just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea. Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation,...

Labeled as an imbecile or a monster by his abusive mother, Jack Plum seeks refuge in his "pigtopia," a shelter in his cellar with a tunnel to the woods, that he shares with his pet pigs and with Holly Lock, a teenager who lives nearby.

Determined to protect his wife and daughters from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland, King moves them to an isolated island, lays out barbed wire, and anchored buoys with a clear message: Do not enter. He institutes cult-like rituals and therapies to fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world. When King disappears, they retreat further inward... until the day two men and a boy wash ashore. Sexual tensions and sibling...

"In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last two left. But when the girl suddenly finds herself alone in an unknown...

"Something unspeakable has happened to sisters July and September. Desperate for a fresh start, their mother, Sheela, moves them across the country to an old family house that has a troubled life of its own. Noises come from behind the walls. Lights flicker of their own accord. Sleep feels impossible; dreams are endless. In their new, unsettling surroundings, July finds that the fierce bond she's always had with September--forged with a blood promise...

This disease takes away the beauty of your face. It eats up your hands and feet and makes us ugly. Other diseases eat up your insides, but they leave you looking beautiful outside." "People in the villages think it is caused by Naga spirits. So they sacrifice chickens and goats and do prayer pujas. That's what they did for me too. My parents didn't know." Since antiquity, leprosy has struck fear into human beings. Seen as contagious, mutilating and...

When Liling moves from her home in the mountains of China to the big city, her parents cannot afford to send her to school, and she spends her days with her mother, wishing she had a friend--until she sees a girl in a yellow coat, who lives in the next building, comes from a different mountain, and is happy to be Liling's friend.

He lives in solitude beneath the city, an exile from society, which will destroy him if he is ever seen. She dwells in seclusion, a fugitive from enemies who will do her harm if she is ever found. But the bond between them runs deeper than the tragedies that have scarred their lives. Something more than chance -- and nothing less than destiny -- has brought them together in a world whose hour of reckoning is fast approaching.