Arcadia Public Library

"Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight they become one. But everything...

Leaving Harvard to complete her dissertation on the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian in England, Eloise Kelly discovers information about the most elusive spy of all time, a figure who single-handedly saved England from Napoleon's invasion.

Bottoming out after a dramatic breakup, doctoral student Lucy accepts her sister's invitation to dog-sit at her home on Venice Beach for the summer, where she meets an eerily attractive swimmer whose Sirenic identity transforms her understanding of what real love looks like.

When Jill becomes both pregnant and single at the end of one spring semester, she and her two closest friends plunge into an experiment in tri-parenting, tri-schooling, and trihabitating as grad students in Seattle. Naturally, everything goes wrong, but in ways no one sees coming.

"A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend -- and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends -- some dating each other,...

Mickey Brandeis, a brilliant doctoral candidate in medieval literature, lives in her parents' garage and swears too often, but she hasn't killed a man since she was ten. Mickey's carefully created adult existence is upended when she is led to a condemned house where she discovers a mutilated corpse. When she is later asked by a timid student to solve a murder that occurred twenty years earlier, Mickey begins to lose hold on her tenuous connection...

"From the moment she discovered her sister's secret relationship with charismatic professor Jay Crane, Jessie Mooney has been convinced that he's to blame for the events leading to her death. Haunted by their last email exchange--You know what you did--she enrolls in graduate school and competes her way into Crane's famous "Law and Literature" class, setting into motion a plan to get close to him so she can expose who he really is. Jessie will cross...

"Steven Harding is a handsome, well-respected professor. Ellie Masterson is a wide-eyed grad student. Together, they are driving south from New York for their first vacation: three days in an isolated cabin, far from the city. Ahead of them, the promise of long, dark nights--and the chance to get to know each other better, away from prying eyes. It should be a perfect romantic getaway for two. But when a snowstorm strands them in the house, each realizes...