Rural Life

Set deep in the Yorkshire Dales, Diane Allen’s A Child of the Dales is a sweeping novel of family, deceit, separation and love. Abandoned as a baby on the steps of a remote inn, Ruby Blake has been raised by the innkeeper’s wife, Martha Metcalfe, unknowing of the family searching for her...

Blythe Harmon is on the fast track to a life she never wanted. On her thirtieth birthday, just as she’s about to lock herself into a high-powered job and accept a marriage proposal to match, an unusual bequest from her beloved late grandmother, Nomi, offers an escape and an invitation to adventure. Equipped with Nomi’s urn of ashes and a treasure map, Blythe sets off for a small island in the San Juans where she rents the mysterious and unsettling Improbable House.

When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region "like a foreign correspondent would." And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky, fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times's Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider. He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemic - a place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day.

Рано осиротев, девочки живут в провинциальном городишке горного штата, и за ними приглядывает целая череда престарелых родственниц, пока в доме не появляется взбалмошная и эксцентричная Сильви, сестра их покойной матери. Две сестры по-разному оценивают странные тетины привычки: Люсиль с трудом их принимает, зато Рут обретает в Сильви родную душу.

Laura Humphrey has had her share of ups and downs. She's loved her job teaching high school music for over twenty-five years in her hometown with a special gift for musical theater. She is devoted to her church, family, and friends. In addition, a romance may be on the horizon with the high school coach, a widower and longtime friend. On the negative side, however, Laura has always doubted her worth to others and has always struggled with sadness over a failed marriage and having no children of her own.

Íosac Mulgannon is a man called to stand. Losing a grip on his mental and physical health, he is burdened with looking after a mute child whom the local villagers view as cursed. The aging farmer stubbornly refuses to succumb in the face of adversity and will do anything, at any cost, to keep hold of his farm and the child. This dark and lyrical debut novel confronts a claustrophobic rural community caught up in the uncertainties of a rapidly changing world.

What Luck, This Life begins in the aftermath of the space shuttle's break-up, as the people of Piney Woods watch their pastures swarm with searchers and reporters bluster at their doors. A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut's remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting Earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor's buried longing.

Diane Allen's The Yorkshire Farm Girl is a heartfelt novel of a family dreaming of a better life when war looms on the horizon. Life is hard for the Fothergill family as they try to make a living on their farm in the Yorkshire Dales. Bob Fothergill has set his sights on buying his own farm...

In an increasingly lonely world, three women strike up an unlikely friendship and find that community, female friendship and the wonders of nature can truly be powerful healers.

Set during WW2 in the Yorkshire valley of Dentdale, Secrets in the Dales is a heartfelt story of family, romance and one woman's determination in hard times. In the sleepy Yorkshire Dales, the peaceful existence of Sally’s family is shattered by the outbreak of the Second World War. With her...

A FARMING LIFE shares the uplifting stories of women from six rural families as their resilience is tested by personal loss, illness, fractured relationships, natural disasters and the challenges that come with working in a traditionally male-dominated world. These women are all hands-on farmers - in fact, most are responsible for managing their own farms - and their defiance, tenacity and genuine humility shines through, as does their hope for the next generation of young women already lining up to follow in their footsteps.

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.

When a black-haired, three-year-old girl is found wounded in a dumpster outside the small town of Travis City, Texas, the mystery of who she is and how she got there sets off a 30-year saga of two diverse families. The little girl, Lourdes, is adopted by Danny and Maria Sanchez, a loving, poor couple, and the child flourishes with her own special talents and assistance by the town patriarch, William Barrett Downs the Third. If you still believe in honor, work ethic, and the power of the individual, you will believe the stories of Travis City, Texas.

Love gets a second chance in this charming cowboy romance from a New York Times bestselling author, perfect for fans of Diana Palmer and Linda Lael Miller. After spending years traveling the world with the military, Rose O'Malley is ready for a change. Heading back to Texas to hold down the fort...

Sisters Amanda Foster and Erin Turner have little in common except the childhood bedroom they once shared and the certainty each feels that her way of life is best. Amanda follows the rules - at the school where she works; in her community; and as a picture-perfect daughter, wife, and mother-to-be. Erin follows her heart - in love and otherwise - living a bohemian lifestyle on a shoestring budget and honoring her late father’s memory with a passion for music and her fledgling bath-products business.

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.

The award-winning, humorous true story of an animal-phobic, city robotics engineer who learns too late that his new bride's dream is to have a farm where she can rescue ex-racehorses. When the newlyweds take a Meyers-Briggs Personality Test for fun, they discover their marriage is doomed. There is only one problem: they took the test after the wedding.

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.

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.

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.