Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Long-hidden secrets unveiled at a lovely old villa. Antonia stared out the Studebaker's rear window as it sped away from her grandfather Quillan's Sonoma villa, leaving behind the vineyard that had been life to her family, a life now lost. The old villa needed what Rese Barrett could do as well as any man on the crew. Trained by the best, she had honed her skills with a passion for quality, an eye for detail, and no room for compromise. Renovation...

The unexpected arrival of her willful teenage granddaughter, Ruby, brings life and disorder to 82-year-old Iris Black's old house in Cairo. Ruby, driven by her fraught relationship with her own mother to run away from England, is seeking refuge with the grandmother she hasn't seen for years. An unlikely bond develops between them, as Ruby helps Iris to record her fading memories of the glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo of World War II, and of her one...

An elderly London resident befriends the little boy who moves in downstairs, but his parents' fighting brings her back to her harrowing escape from Nazi Germany at age twelve and grim post-war years in France with her mother. Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She doesn't talk about her escape from Nazi...

"Olive Kitteridge has returned, as indomitable as ever ... this time as a person getting older, navigating her next decade as she comes to terms with the changes--sometimes welcome, sometimes not--in her own life. Here is Olive, strangely content in her second marriage, still in an evolving relationship with her son and his family, encountering a cast of memorable characters in the seaside town of Crosby, Maine. Whether it's a young girl coming to...

Newly independent widow Emily Maxwell dreams of visits by grandchildren and mourns changes in her quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood before realizing an inner strength to pursue developing opportunities.

"Sometimes what your life is missing is an eccentric group of older ladies to take you under their wing . . . When Raeley Ann Sutton's mama passes away and leaves her the house where she grew up, Rae can't imagine how the little old place might restore her broken life. Mourning the recent loss of her marriage, she takes the house and settles back in tiny, "one-horse Whitten" with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Molly Margaret, and their overweight...

In the wealth-studded hills of Jefferson County, Virginia, the all-important New Year's Hunt begins, but the festivities are marred by what appears to be an unrelated tragedy: Sam Lorillard, former shining star and Harvard Law alum, lies dead of a stab wound at the old train station.

"Two women, separated by a generation but equally scarred by war find hope, meaning and friendship through a garden of flowers. Iris Maynard lost her husband in World War II, her daughter to loneliness and, finally, her reason to live. Walled off from the world for decades behind a towering fence surrounding her home and gardens, Iris has built a new family...of flowers. Iris propagates her own daylilies and roses while tending to an heirloom garden...

The masterful story of a lifelong friendship between two very different women with shared histories and buried secrets, tested in the twilight of their lives, set across the arc of the 20th century. Celebrated children's book author Agnes Lee is determined to secure her legacy--to complete what she knows will be the final volume of her pseudonymously written Franklin Square novels; and even more consuming, to permanently protect the peninsula of majestic...

The wife of a landscape designer in Pennsylvania obtains a job doing housework for an old woman who quilts, and in the process learns to quilt herself. As the two quilt, the old one recounts her family's tragic story.