Bandon Public Library

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.

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...

Nina Browning is living the good life after marrying into Nashville's elite. Her husband's tech business is booming, and her adored son, Finch, is bound for Princeton. Tom Volpe is a single dad working multiple jobs. His adored daughter, Lyla, attends Nashville's most prestigious private school on a scholarship. But amid the wealth and privilege, Lyla doesn't always fit in. Then one devastating photo changes everything. Finch snaps a picture of Lyla...

Overview: Anne, like her sisters Emily and Charlotte, published under a male pseudonym, Acton Bell, yet still this novel was scorned by many for its exposure of the abusive male chauvinism concealed, like all things sexual, during the Victorian Era. Just as she had to use a male pseudonym in order to be free to publish, as women authors were not yet deemed acceptable or bankable, Helen Graham, the novel's protagonist and a battered wife, assumes an...

"No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles - military and domestic - are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable...

"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,...

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.

This is a new translation of the seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) - the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. A contemporary bestseller, it outraged conservative critics and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature.

A book which has achieved more notoriety for its sex scenes (shocking in 1930, when the book was written) than for its character studies, Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the affair between Constance, the "sturdy" young wife of Clifford Chatterley, and the gamekeeper of the Chatterleys' estate in the remote midlands. Constance, who married Clifford a month before he left for World War I, has become his caretaker since his return from the war, paralyzed...