Great Depression Fiction

Bea Abramovitz has a gift for math and numbers. With her father, she studies the burgeoning Wall Street market’s stocks and patterns in the financial pages. After college she’s determined to parlay her talent for the prediction game into personal and professional success. But in the 1920s, in a Lower East Side tenement, opportunities for women don’t just come knocking. Bea will have to create them.

Ten-year-old Pearl Spence is a daydreamer, playing make-believe to escape life in Oklahoma's Dust Bowl in 1935. The Spences have their share of misfortune, but as the sheriff's family, they've got more than most in this dry, desolate place. They're who the town turns to when there's a crisis or a need. Pearl is proud of her loving, strong family, though she often wearies of tracking down her mentally impaired older sister or wrestling with her grandmother's unshakable belief in a God. Then a mysterious man bent on revenge tramps into her town of Red River.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of the runaway phenomenon Unbroken comes a universal underdog story about the horse who came out of nowhere to become a legend. “Fascinating . . . Vivid . . . A first-rate piece of storytelling, leaving us not only with a vivid portrait of a...

Set during the Depression in the South Chicago neighborhood of Sinclair's The Jungle, Betty O'Leary's family struggles to scrape by in this harsh, foul-smelling, yet compassionate area. The youngest in her Irish Catholic family, Betty is overshadowed by her pretty sister, Maureen, and when tragedy threatens to shatter her world, Betty is sent away to stay with relatives.

A curmudgeon and his eccentric new roommate join together to plan an epic escape in this charming, poignant tale. Joel lives in a nursing home, and he’s not one bit happy about it. He hates being told when to eat, when to sleep, when to take his pills. He’s fed up with life and begins to...

When the Depression strikes America, throwing millions out of work, Petey Williamson's family seems safe. Hadn't the boss promised Petey's father that he'd always have a job? But during the Depression, promises cannot always be kept, and Petey finds his family sliding rapidly into poverty. And when Petey's much-admired cousin, Steve, starts working as a union organizer in the battle to improve conditions for workers, poverty turns into tragedy.

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lords of Finance, a magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity and the famous banking family at the center of the whirlwind Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the...

Hattie Barton’s life changes forever on October 24, 1929, the historic day of the New York stock market crash. She is suddenly forced to leave her palatial home in Calhoun, relocate to an apartment in her hometown in Greenville, and find work to support herself, her two young daughters Pauline and Alice, and her trusted housekeeper, Georgia. When she takes a job as secretary in a small insurance firm, a potential romance develops between Hattie and her boss, Seth Snoddy However, an unexpected turn causes her to reevaluate whether she can ever settle for a marriage of convenience.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Women, a historical novel about three women’s lives on a California island On a tiny, desolate, windswept island off the coast of Southern California, two families, one in the 1880s and one in the 1930s, come to start new lives and pursue...

In the summer of 1967, the Levitsky family convenes for a long weekend at their home in the suburbs—an idyllic holiday for the perfect family. But Nora has always known better. Growing up, she learned to tiptoe around her mother Lillian’s explosive temper. Her father did the same. Nora’s sole confidante was their housekeeper, Clara, and their bond has only strengthened through the years.

One whirlwind week of love, blackmail, and betrayal follows three brothers through teeming prewar New York in this "entertaining . . . outsized . . . big, expressive debut" (Wall Street Journal). June 1939. Francis Dempsey and his shell-shocked brother, Michael, are on an ocean liner from...

Jo has a gift. She is a mathematical prodigy—a woman who sees and thinks in numbers. She secures a job as a teller at Central Bank & Trust, where she recreates herself as a modern woman and rises through the professional ranks. While working at the bank, Jo becomes fascinated by Levi Arrowood, the dark and mysterious manager of the Sky Club, an infamous speakeasy and jazz club on the mountainside above town.

In the heart of the Great Depression, Rancho Las Moras, like everywhere else in Texas, is gripped by the drought of the Dust Bowl, and resentment is building among white farmers against Mexican Americans. All around town, signs go up proclaiming “No Dogs or Mexicans” and “No Mexicans Allowed.” When Estrella organizes a protest against the treatment of tejanos in their town of Monteseco, Texas, her whole family becomes a target of “repatriation” efforts to send Mexicans “back to Mexico”—whether they were ever Mexican citizens or not.

Newly orphaned Magnolia Parker must protect her sick little brothers, but when the authorities send the boys to an unknown orphan asylum, Magnolia calls on her unwavering grit to bring them home. She's lost everything but still has a secret weapon—a promise from Eleanor Roosevelt, the most famous woman in America. Setting out on a cross country quest, she befriends two unlikely travelers: Hop, a migrant worker with a big heart, and Red, a young girl traumatized into silence.

Sixteen-year-old Nostalgia Richardson has lived all her life in the rural township of Spivey’s Grove, South Carolina, but that has not stopped her from dreaming of running away to Harlem to become a showgirl at the world famous Cotton Club. One night, when she comes home from work, she finds her father in the company of Noah Holdtstaff, the most notorious bootlegger in town. Later, Nostalgia’s 14-year-old sister, Lily, divulges their father’s plans to marry her off to the 49-year-old Noah.

Journey with a horseback librarian into the hidden crevices of Kentucky mountains. Feel her pain as she struggles not only to barely make ends meet, but as she also attempts to connect the pieces of her own life while her mom continues to make selfish decisions. Lena Davis is the daughter her mom never wanted. But she survived. Through stories. Because books didn’t judge. Books weren’t angry she was alive. Books never expected her to be anything but who she was.

This is the first installment of the action and adventure-packed historical fiction book series, The Boloney Trail Trilogy. The novel tells the remarkable true events of the Hornbeck family, who struggle to survive The Great Depression, only then to become key players in the birth of the feared Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel.

From a fresh and exciting new voice in women's fiction, The Language of Secrets unflinchingly examines the lifelong repercussions of a father's betrayal. Justin Fisher has a successful career as the manager of a luxury hotel, a lovely wife, and a charming young son. While all signs point to a...

The place: rural Vermont. The time: the Great Depression. Henry Talcott's beautiful wife, Irene, has recently left him. He and their two young children, Thomas and Margaret, are spending the summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. It's a bittersweet idyll.

It is the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a passionate young man from Paterson, New Jersey, leaves home to find his fortune. What he finds, on a cold and lonely night in the Adirondack Mountains, is a vision of life so different from his own that it changes his destiny, leading him from the...