Bandon Public Library

Though written in the 1850s, 'The Scarlet Letter' is a story fit for our modern times, with its exploration of female independence in a restrictive society where the concept of sin is used as a repressive instrument of control, particularly of women. A clear inspiration for Margaret Atwood's dystopian powerhouse, 'The Handmaid's Tale,' Hawthorne artfully highlights the hypocricy of Hester Prynne's humiliation, and charts her struggle to assert her...

Immediately recognized as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1847, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is an extraordinary coming-of-age story featuring one of the most independent and strong-willed female protagonists in all of literature. Poor and plain, Jane Eyre begins life as a lonely orphan in the household of her hateful aunt and then is sent to the Lowood School, a situation even worse. She becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, where...

A young bride is brought by her new husband to his manor house in England. There she finds that the memory of her husband's first wife haunts her, and she tries to discover the secret of that mysterious woman's death.

A story of a tragic, adulterous love. Anna meets and falls in love with Aleksei Vronski, a handsome young officer. She abandons her child and husband in order to be with Vronski and when she thinks he has tired of her, she kills herself by leaping under a train.

"Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright... Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University,...

When her daughters leave for college and her husband lands the job of his dreams, Elizabeth Shore struggles to renew her dreams and passion for life.

Jeremy Marsh is now living in Boone Creek, North Carolina, married to Lexie Darnell, and awaiting the birth of their daughter. But, just as when things a looking goods, an unsettling and mysterious message brings trouble from the past

Orphaned as a teenager, Jim Burden comes to live with his stern grandparents on their isolated farm. His pain and loneliness ease when he meets the beautiful Antonia, the high spirited daugher of neighboring immigrant farmers. Antonia's lust for life in her new country endears the young woman to Jim, but not his grandparents, who want bigger and better things for their grandson

A transcendent tale of a woman's self-discovery—the New York Times–bestselling second work of fiction by the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings
Inside the church of a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before...

An evocative story of friendship set against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century China in which women suffered from foot binding, isolation, and illiteracy follows an elderly woman and her companion as they communicate their hopes, dreams, joys, and tragedies through a unique secret language