Orem Library

In 17th-century Japan, a samurai's daughter, Oharu, falls in love with a servant. Caught together, the man is beheaded and Oharu and her family are exiled. After enduring further misfortunes as a concubine, a courtesan, wife, and prostitute, Oharu becomes a mendicant nun in her old age. A peerless chronicler of the soul who specialized in supremely emotional, visually exquisite films about the circumstances of women in Japanese society throughout...

"Det. Lieut. Virgil Tibbs of the San Francisco homicide squad receives an anonymous phone call accusing his close friend, community activist Rev. Logan Sharpe, of murdering a prostitute. The detective questions the clergyman, who admits having visited the victim to bestow pastoral counsel. Other suspects include Rice Weedon, a landlord and narcotics dealer whom Tibbs shoots in self-defense; black janitor Mealie; and Woody Garfield, the victim's protector....

Published in 1893, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets shocked a world unprepared for its grim and starkly realistic exploration of a pretty young girl's fall on New York's Bowery, and its critical depiction of the irresponsibility of men toward women. The five other stories in this collection are tales of quiet tension and raw intensity. From the local color of small-town life to the bustle of the city to war stories imbued with an ironic view of heroism,...

Realizing that her lover Jean is losing interest in her, a society lady Helene gets revenge by tricking him into marrying a former prostitute Agnes. After the wedding Helene tells a stunned Jean about his wife's secret past.

"In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group...

In 1870s London, a prostitute known as Sugar sees a potential way out of the brothel she works for when she is taken in by William Rackham, the son of a wealthy businessman.

Just as the summer in Loon Lake is heating up, the town is turned upside downby a bizarre triple homicide. Police Chief Lew Ferris must root the skeletons out of a family's closet before a killer gets away.

"Sarah Gilchrist fled London and a troubled past to join the University of Edinburgh's medical school in 1892, the first year it admitted women. Determined to become a doctor despite the misgivings of her family and society, Sarah quickly finds plenty of barriers at school itself; professors who refuse to teach their new pupils, male students determined to force out their female counterparts, and-- perhaps worst of all-- female peers who will do anything...

A rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls. Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start...