Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

As a single mom and the sole proprietor of Token Creek's general store, Jessie lives day to day with her hands full and her heart broken. When the husband who abandoned her returns to town claiming he's a man changed by faith, he sets out to prove his commitment and his love.

After a 20-year marriage, an army colonel's wife is abandoned by her husband, who empties their bank account. In the next eight years Kristin Kelly finds another man, gets a divorce and her three children are adjusting, when the husband appears on the doorstep, asking to resume the marriage. By the author of Finders Keepers.

Boone's Lick transports the reader to the era about which McMurtry writes better and more shrewdly than anyone else. Told with McMurtry's unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling genius, the novel follows the Cecil family's arduous journey by riverboat and wagon from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay narrates, describing the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down...

A classic novel from an exceptional storyteller, A Woman Betrayed, first published in 1991, is a stunning tale of troubling secrets that can hide beneath the placid surface of a seemingly good marriage-and the courage that's needed to move on. Laura Frye has been happily married to her husband, Jeff, for twenty years. She has everything she ever wanted: strong, enduring, romantic love; two wonderful kids; even her own successful catering business....

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life, but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together--with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell ...

Beautifully written and compelling, About Grace is the brilliant debut novel from Anthony Doerr. Growing up in Alaska, young David Winkler is crippled by his dreams. At nine, he dreams a man is decapitated by a passing truck on the path outside his family's home. The next day, unable to prevent it, he witnesses an exact replay of his dream in real life. The premonitions keep coming, unstoppably. He sleepwalks during them, bringing catastrophe into...

"Southern housewife Linwood Breedlove Scott was happily content in her comfortable, complacent, thirty-year marriage, but when her husband cleans out their bank accounts and runs off with a stripper, her life takes a hilarious, yet touching, right turn into reality. With no place to go but home, she's forced back to her insular hometown and the "eccentric" family she escaped by marrying at nineteen: her senile father, her loving yet controlling mother,...

When Gabriel Du Pré goes looking his aunt's missing husband, the investigation leads to a body instead and to an underworld of illegal brush races involving traveling horsemen.

"Violet and Finn were "meant to be," said everyone, always. They ended up together by the hands of fate aligning things just so. Three years into their marriage, they have a wonderful little boy, and as the three of them embark on their first vacation as a family, Violet can't help thinking that she can't believe her luck. Life is good. So no one is more surprised than she when Finn leaves her at the beach -- just packs up the hotel room and disappears....