Adult

The technological marvel of its age, the Erie Canal grew out of a sudden fit of inspiration. Proponents didn't just dream; they built a 360-mile waterway entirely by hand and largely through wilderness. As excitement crackled down its length, the canal became the scene of the most striking outburst of imagination in American history. It made New York the financial capital of America and brought the modern world crashing into the frontier. Men and women saw God face to face, gained and lost fortunes, and reveled in a period of intense spiritual creativity. HEAVEN’S DITCH illuminates the spiritual and political upheavals along this "psychic highway" from its opening in 1825 through 1844.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut captures the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, the novel focuses on the details of a young woman’s daily experience --- rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood.

Thirty-year-old Barbara Weaver was content to live as the Amish have for centuries, but her husband, Eli, wanted a life beyond horses and buggies. When Barbara was found dead, shot in the chest at close range, all eyes were on Eli…and his mistress, a Conservative Mennonite named Barb Raber. The Weaver case marked only the third time an Amish man was suspected of killing his wife in more than 200 years in America. But the investigation raised almost as many questions as it answered: Was Barb Raber the one who fired the fatal shot? Or was Barbara Weaver dead before someone entered the house? What did Eli’s friends, family and church really know about him? And will life among the “Plain People” ever be the same?

After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, Louisa Clark is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started. Thanks to the members of the Moving On support group, Lou meets strong, capable Sam Fielding, a paramedic whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future.

Self-educated and brown-skinned, Cassie works full time in her grandmother’s laundry in rural Mississippi. Illiterate and white, Judith falls for “colored music” and dreams of life as a big city radio star. These teenaged girls are half-sisters. And when they catch wind of their wayward father’s inheritance coming down in Virginia, they hitch their hopes to a road trip together to claim what’s rightly theirs. In an old junk car, with a frying pan, a ham and a few dollars hidden in a shoe, they set off through the American Deep South of the 1950s, a bewitchingly beautiful landscape as well as one bedeviled by racial strife and violence.

Jonathan Trefoil’s boss is unhinged, his relationship baffling, and his apartment just the wrong side of legal. His girlfriend wants to marry someone just like him --- only richer and with a different sense of humor. He doesn’t remember life being this confusing, back before everyone expected him to act like a grown-up. When his brother asks him to look after his dogs, Jonathan's world view begins to shift. Could a border collie and a cocker spaniel hold the key to life, the universe and everything? Their sly maneuvering on daily walks and visits to the alluring vet suggest that human emotional intelligence may not be top dog after all.

Twenty-six archival magazine covers from 1912 to 1932, by 10 celebrated illustrators living here and abroad, take you back to a more playful and whimsical moment of boas, bows, hats and headpieces, fans, pearls and gloves, and even exotic animals. Coloring book fans of all ages can try their hand at the Art Deco patterns and letters from A to Z and the lively drawings of women dressed for the task at hand, whether it is driving their own car, pruning morning glories in the garden, feeding a dragon, steering a gondola, sitting on a crescent moon, perched on a peacock or riding a zebra --- side-saddle, of course.