Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have fallen sick are quarantined into a separate ward to keep the plague at bay.
(Description from catalog)

Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance. In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life.
(Description from catalog)

Fleeing the Depression-era school for Native American children who have been taken from their parents, four orphans share a summer marked by struggling farmers, faith healers and lost souls. (Description from NoveList.)

Volunteering for Eleanor Roosevelt's new traveling library in small-town Kentucky, an English bride joins a group of independent women whose commitment to their job transforms the community and their relationships. (Description from NoveList.)

In 1947, pregnant Charlie St. Clair, an American college girl banished from her family, arrives in London to find out what happened to her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, and meets a former spy who, torn apart by betrayal, agrees to help her on her mission. (Description from NoveList.)

A last-of-her-kind outcast and member of the Pack Horse Library Project braves the hardships of Kentucky's Great Depression and hostile community discrimination to bring the near-magical perspectives of books to her neighbors. (Description from NoveList.)

Eschewed by her wealthy Smith College classmates, a former scholarship student reluctantly volunteers to join a group of graduates who travel to Europe to help World War I French civilians before finding herself surrounded by desperate families in villages decimated by German bombs.
(Description from catalog)