Rural Life

Theron Ware is a promising young Methodist pastor recently assigned to a congregation in the Adirondack Mountains, which Frederic modeled after Utica, New York. His education and experiences have been limited to church society and his strict enforcement of its norms. Theron begins to question the Methodist religion, his role as a minister, and the existence of God. His “illumination” consists of his awakening to new intellectual and artistic experiences embodied by several of his new acquaintances.

In 16 remarkable stories, the award-winning author of Elizabeth's Field and other books captures the flavor of Maryland's Eastern Shore. While her characters are tied to the reality of the moment, their stories are about the secret life of the heart's yearning.

At first glance, the stories in Sweet and Low seem grounded in the everyday: they paint pictures of idyllic Southern landscapes, characters fulfilling their roles as students, wives, boyfriends. But they are not what they seem. In these stories, Nick White deconstructs the core qualities of Southern fiction, exposing deeply flawed and fascinating characters - promiscuous academics, aging podcasters, woodpecker assassins, and lawnmower enthusiasts, among others - all on wildly compelling quests. White's honest and provocative prose will jolt listeners awake with its urgency.

In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For 17-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with in her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world.

Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialized in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation—to be careful of men and desire—are not just Grace’s to learn. Her family’s tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalized in folk songs like “Knoxville Girl” and “Pretty Polly” reminding them always to know their place.

Presley Ingram has often wondered about her birth parents. Yet her 23andMe test kit remains unopened in her bedside table drawer. When she finds an address on a torn envelope in her adoption file upon her adoptive mother's death, she makes an impulsive decision to travel to the mountains of Virginia in search of answers. In the charming town of Hope Springs, she discovers her dream job as an event planner at the prestigious Inn at Hope Springs Farms and the potential for romance with a ruggedly handsome bartender.

As a toddler, Elodie Jacques was abandoned by her mother and left in the care of her French grandmother, Gabriella in Dartmouth, Devon. Now 24 years old, Elodie struggles to reconcile the deep anger for the mother she has never since seen. When Gabriella unexpectedly announces she wants the two of them to spend Christmas and her 70th birthday in her home town of Juan-les-Pins in the South of France, Elodie is thrilled. Gabriella meanwhile has her own ulterior motives for wanting to return after 40 years, a homecoming potentially filled with memories, secrets and recriminations.

Rientrato devastato dal Vietnam, Ernt Allbright decide di trasferirsi con la famiglia nella selvaggia Alaska, l'ultima frontiera americana, e iniziare una nuova vita con la moglie Cora e la figlia adolescente Leni. L'inizio è promettente, ma con l'avanzare del lungo inverno artico lo stato mentale di Ernt peggiora. Leni e Cora si trovano sole, in un luogo feroce ai confini del mondo, dove nessuno può salvarle.

Exploring the diverse landscape of American life, the stories in Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories capture the lives of people caught between circumstance and their own natures or on the run from fate. Tom Piazza’s debut short story collection, originally published in 1996, heralded the arrival of a startlingly original and vital presence in American fiction and letters. Set in Memphis, New Orleans, Florida, Texas, New York City, and elsewhere, the stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson in their sharp eye for detail and their emotional impact.

For decades J.J. Tucker has brought laughter and sunshine to the Sandbar Sisters. But her life has spiraled out of control. A disaster has turned Irish Hills upside down and has left J.J. alone and unsure. She can't bear to look back on her life and moving forward hurts too much. Her future, once bright and filled with love, feels lonely and hopeless. J.J. faces a very different future than she had planned and one she's not sure if she wants. She will have to face her fears and her past if she wants to find the laughter in her life again.

Sunday’s father is dying of cancer. They’ve come home to Malagash, on the north shore of Nova Scotia, so he can die where he grew up. Her mother and her brother are both devastated. But devastated isn’t good enough. Devastated doesn’t fix anything. Sunday has a plan.

Rhian Grey left her home in Sweyn’s Eye to make a life for herself in Yorkshire, where she learnt the skills of spinning and weaving. She also learnt to love Mansel Jack, a charismatic and ambitious mill-owner. When Rhian returns to Sweyn’s Eye, it is to a town torn apart by anxiety and uncertainty, by the devastation of the Great War, a town whose workers' lives are governed by fear. Amidst the anguish and dedication of the women who were left behind, Rhian must decide where her own future lies.

For young couple Taz and Marnie, their fixer-upper is the symbol of their new life together: a work in progress, the beginning of something grand, all the more so when they learn that a baby is on the way. But the blueprint for the perfect life eludes Taz when Marnie dies in childbirth, plummeting the taciturn carpenter headfirst into the new, strange world of fatherhood alone, a landscape of contradictions, of great joy and sorrow.

This highly anticipated sequel to Delaney's People takes listeners on a turbulent, surprise-filled journey from Depression-era rural Alabama through 2011's devastating tornadoes and their impact on Delaney's family and friends. Family ties, love, loss, betrayal and a characteristic dead mule combine in a perfect book for devotees of Southern literature.

The Whitsun Daughters is a story of three contemporary teenage girls - sisters and cousins - in a small Midwestern town, narrated by the ghost of a young woman who, over a century earlier, lived and loved on the same small patch of farmland the girls now call home. The book follows both the present-day story of the three Whitsun girls and the story of Jane Murphy a century earlier as they fight to assert their own desires in worlds determined to ignore and minimize them.

"If you, too, feel like wandering, come along and help me unravel this odd tale - a tale full of half-truths, whole-truths, and no-truths at all." So begins Frank Capra's never published, and often speculated about novel of his favorite place - Silver Lake, nestled in the jagged cliffs of the eastern Sierra Nevadas. Capra casts the fictional Frank Capra in the lead roll of this novel of environmental and humanitarian preservation.

Thirty-five years after the publication of Ronald Blythe's classic portrait of an English village, Akenfield, Craig Taylor returned to the Suffolk village on which the book was based. He sought out locals who appeared in the original book to learn how their lives had changed, met newcomers, and interviewed Ronald Blythe himself.

Set in the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1900 - a time when many Americans were looking for signs foretelling the end of the world - Feather Crowns is the story of a young woman who unintentionally creates a national sensation. A farm wife living near the small town of Hopewell, Kentucky, Christianna Wheeler gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America. Christie is suddenly thrown into a swirling storm of public attention. Thousands of strangers descend on her home, all wanting too see and touch the "miracle babies."

The things history will do at the bidding of love.... On a warm Sunday afternoon, Nazia and Sharif are preparing for a family barbecue. They are in the house in Sheffield that will do for the rest of their lives. In the garden next door is a retired doctor whose four children have long since left home. When the shadow of death passes over Nazia and Sharif's party, Dr Spinster's actions are going to bring the two families together for decades to come.

Una famiglia del Nord Italia, tra l'inizio di un secolo e l'avvento di un altro. I Sartori, quattro generazioni, dal 1917 al 2012, dal Friuli rurale alla Milano contemporanea, dalle guerre mondiali alla ricostruzione alla globalizzazione, dal lavoro nei campi alle scrivanie delle multinazionali. Romanzo storico e corale, vasto ritratto narrativo del Novecento italiano, forse il primo di uno scrittore sotto i quarant'anni, il racconto dei Sartori affronta il fardello di un'eredità che sembra andata in malora. Se gli errori e le sfortune dei padri ricadono sui figli, come liberarsene?