Orem Library

Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and the secret father of her child, Pearl, struggles with the agony of conscience and his own weakness. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, revenges himself on Dimmesdale by calculating assaults on the frail mental state of the conscience-stricken cleric. The result is an American tragedy of stark...

After her daughter, Chess, breaks off an engagement and her fiancé subsequently dies in a rock-climbing accident, divorcée Birdie Cousins encourages her younger daughter, Tate, and her sister, India, to join her and Chess on Tuckernuck Island for a month, a time when deep secrets are soon revealed.

With the extraordinary changes to society and families ushered in with the Industrial Revolution, the quaint countryside of Lilly Armbrusters youth has been transformed, bringing to some great wealth and to others, tragic loss. Forced to work in the mills as her only means of survival, Lilly is deeply resentful of the powerful mill owners she believes have stolen her fathers farm and caused his premature death. Though intent on avenging...

Set in seventeenth-century New England, Hope Leslie (1827) portrays early American life and celebrates the role of women in building the republic. A counterpoint to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, it challenges the conventional view of Indians, tackles interracial marriage and cross-cultural friendship, and claims for women their rightful place in history.

A companion to Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," in which Una Spenser tells the story of her life, and discusses her loving marriage to Captain Ahab before the white whale took his leg and drove him into madness.