NCW Libraries

Cleaner Janice knows that it is in people's stories that you really get to know them. From recently-widowed Fiona and her son Adam; to opera-singing Geordie; and the awful Mrs 'YeahYeahYeah' and her fox terrier, Decius, Janice has a unique insight into the community around her. When Janice starts cleaning for Mrs B - a shrewd and tricksy woman in her nineties - she finally meets someone who wants to hear her story. But Janice is clear: she is the...

The new housekeeper for a wealthy elderly woman in her isolated mansion, Rachel Hurst discovers that someone is intent on harming her employer and turns to her son, a man who she had rejected, for help in finding the truth.

Carl Kanisky is chief of police in Glenlawn, California. After the death of his wife, Margaret, he asks her friend, Nell Harper, to come in to keep house and take care of his children, Katie, Julie, and Samantha. In short time, Nell becomes like a mother to them. Later, Carl's father, Stanley, moves in. Around the same time, Nell takes in young Joey Donovan as her foster son.

Clara Kelley is not who they think she is. She's not the experienced Irish maid who was hired to work in one of Pittsburgh's grandest households. She's a poor farmer's daughter with nowhere to go and nothing in her pockets. But the other woman with the same name has vanished, and pretending to be her just might get Clara some money to send back home. If she can keep up the ruse, that is. Serving as a lady's maid in the household of Andrew Carnegie...

"The surprising, often fiercely feminist, always fascinating, yet barely known, history of home economics. The term "home economics" may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken cakes. But obscured by common conception is the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the twentieth century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists,...

"When ownership of the estate where Daphne Blakemoor works passes to William, Marquis of Chemsford, her quiet, secluded life is threatened. William has a connection to her youth--and they've both been hiding from the past. Can they face their deepest wounds and forge a new path for the future?" --

Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project.

"With toiletries, hairbands, and notebooks in her bag, and at her mother's instruction, a nineteen-year-old girl leaves her parents' home and the seaside town she grew up in. Out the train window, Rafa sees the lit-up mountains and perfect trees-and the Olympic Hotel waiting for her perched above the small village of Strega. There, she and eight other girls receive the stiff black uniforms of seasonal workers and move into their shared dorm. But while...

The delightful second installment in McCall Smith's already hugely popular new detective series, "The Sunday Philosophy Club," stars the irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie--editor of the "Journal of Applied Ethics"--And her no-nonsense housekeeper, Grace.

"No woman walks away from Zane Westmoreland. But when Channing Hastings does just that, it leaves the rancher reeling--and then she returns to town, engaged! Zane will do whatever it takes to show her that there is no man for her but him."--Provided by publisher.