Monroe Free Library

Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history--performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life. So Tom moves back his to London, his old home, to become a high school history teacher--the perfect job for someone who has witnessed the city's...

"In the quiet of my forgotten office in the old country courthouse, behind the plastic doorplate that reads 'Deputy David Mapstone, Sheriff's Office Historian', I fiddled with the tribal fashion of cops. The tan uniform blouse with epaulets and pocket flaps, the opening above the pocket made for a cheap Cross pen, and the gold-plated 'MCSO' letters running parallel on each side of the collars. An off-white felt Stetson sat on my desk. We might be...

"In the vein of The Library of Lost and Found by Phaedra Patrick, a priceless manuscript could be one woman's key to finding her missing grandmother--and to her own second chance. It's not just Ellora Lockwood's home that's being emptied as she prepares to sell--her heart seems to be empty too. Since the mysterious disappearance of her beloved Grandma June and separating from her husband, Alex, Ellora has felt adrift. Then comes an invitation from...

This tightly constructed tale by PEN/Faulkner finalist Steve Yarbrough tells the story of a Mississippi history teacher who's determined to unravel the truth about one tragic day in 1962. Even as he pursues an affair with a long-lost friend, he wonders if she could hold the missing piece to this racially charged puzzle.

"Cities of Women is a work of historical literary fiction inspired by a decade of research on the medieval life and times of the proto-feminist, Christine de Pizan, the first European woman of letters to support herself as a writer. Like A.S. Byatt's Possession, the story moves between present and past in a dual narrative, evoking the spare joys and monumental pitfalls facing medieval women artists, and a contemporary woman who becomes obsessed with...

One man's quiet life is shattered when he's forced to confront terrifying secrets he'd thought buried high in the Italian Alps The New York Times has called his work "daring and remarkably assured," The Washington Post has dubbed it "shamelessly entertaining," and the Los Angeles Times claims it renders "the raw elegence of the human experience itself." Now Paul Watkins returns with his most engaging and atmospheric novel yet. The ice soldier of...

"Alif is a middle-aged, mild-mannered history teacher, living in contemporary Delhi, at a time when Muslims in India are seen either as hapless victims or live threats. Though his life's passion is the history he teaches, it's the present that presses down on him: his wife is set on a bigger house and a better car while trying to ace her MBA exams; his teenage son wants to quit school to get rich; his supercilious colleagues are suspicious of a Muslim...