Peyton Place, published in 1956, has sold over 10,000,000 copies world-wide and remains one of the biggest selling novels of all time. Its sequel, Return to Peyton Place, published in 1959, was a national best-seller for many, many months. It was considered absolutely scandalous when it was published. Peyton Place stirred controversy with its explicit—for the time—depictions of sex and sins in a small New England town. Today, the once shocking novel and its sequel seem tame, and are taught in college English courses as classics of their time, well-written and honest in the evocation of the passions, jealousies, and secrets of small-town America. In 1957, it was made into an award-winning movie starring Lana Turner.
Karissa Hill is a popular member of Summerwind High's pep squad who elopes with the boy of her dreams. But then she discovers that her husband has a dark side, and keeps her deeply troubled marriage a secret until graduation. As Karissa helplessly watches her friends leave for jobs and college, she struggles for her own personal identity in the face of a crisis that leaves her alone.
Robert and Lynn Ferguson seem to have a perfect life. But behind the perfect appearance, things are very different. Not even their friends know the truth, although when they see Lynn’s bruises, they begin to suspect. Can Lynn find the courage to admit the truth?
The author of The Commitments and Paddy Clarke Ha-Ha-Ha, winner of the 1993 Booker Prize, tells the story of Paula Spencer, a woman approaching forty and struggling with alcoholism and a violent marriage. Paula Spencer is the sequel.
Although journalists Harold and Maureen English seem the have the perfect
marriage, things are very different behind closed doors. When Maureen is severely
beaten, she escapes to Maine with her infant daughter. But Harold follows right
behind her.
Rosie Daniels flees her nightmare marriage to find refuge in a strange city, far from her brutal husband, Norman, whose relentless savagery and mad obsessions follow her to her sanctuary and drive her to transform herself to survive.
Anthropologist Cassie Barrett is swept off her feet by actor Alex Rivers when she serves as an advisor on his latest film. However, the picture-perfect Hollywood marriage is not as perfect as it seems. Alex has had a troubled life, and Cassie becomes the victim of his abuse.
Maddy Hunter seems to have it all. She’s a popular TV news anchor and married to the wealthy, handsome owner of the station, Jack Hunter, who saved her from an abusive first husband. What people don’t see is that Jack is a controlling man who constantly belittles and insults Maddy.
After her older sister runs away, 16-year-old Caitlin decides she needs to make a
major change in her own life and begins an abusive relationship with a boy who is
mysterious, brilliant and dangerous.
"Fran Benedetto tells a spellbinding story: how at nineteen she fell in love with Bobby Benedetto, how their passionate marriage became a nightmare, why she stayed, and what happened on the night she finally decided to run away with her ten-year-old son and start a new life under a new name. Living in fear in Florida--yet with increasing confidence, freedom, and hope--Fran unravels the complex threads of family, identity, and desire that shape a woman's life, even as she begins to create a new one. As Fran starts to heal from the pain of the past, she almost believes she has escaped it--that Bobby Benedetto will not find her and again provoke the complex combustion between them of attraction and destruction, lust and love."
You, as librarians, stand at the door beyond which this infinity resides…As the 19th century French writer Victor Hugo said: "A library implies an act of faith." You are the keepers of that faith.
