Rural Small Town Fiction

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., spiritually suited to playing left field but forced by a bad hamstring to try first base, is the unlikely chairman of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Over the course of a single convoluted week, he threatens to execute a duck, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than he does, suspects his wife of having an affair with his dean, and finally confronts his philandering elderly father, the one-time king of American Literary Theory, at an abandoned amusement park.

With his long hair and penchant for guitar, teenage Justin is the spitting image of his idol, Kurt Cobain—a resemblance that has often marked him an outcast. When the long-simmering abuse from his uncle finally boils over, Justin has no choice but to break free, in a violent act that will haunt him, and try to make it on his own as a runaway. Meanwhile, in rural Montana, Rene Bouchard, a rancher nearing retirement, grieves the recent death of his wife. Her passing has revealed precisely how fractured the family has become—particularly the relationship between Rene and his daughter, Lianne.

A warm June evening, a local tradition: The students of Nantucket High have gathered for a bonfire on the beach. But what begins as a graduation night celebration ends in tragedy after a horrible car crash leaves the driver of the car, Penny Alistair, dead and her twin brother in a coma. The other passengers - Penny's boyfriend Jake and her friend Demeter - are physically unhurt, but the emotional damage is overwhelming, and questions linger about what happened before Penny took the wheel.

In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.

No longer tolerating her husband’s borderline abuse, Faith escapes to her parents’ California beach house to plan her next move. She never dreamed her new chapter would involve befriending Sarah, a fourteen-year-old on the run from her father and reeling from her mother’s sudden and suspicious death. While Sarah’s grandmother scrambles to get custody, Faith is charged with spiriting the girl away on a journey that will restore her hope: Sarah implores Faith to take her to Falkner’s Midnight Sun, the prized black mare that her father sold out from under her.

I’ve got her brother’s approval, but now it’s Claire that I really have to convince. She doesn’t believe we have the right ingredients for a real relationship—so she only agrees to pretend to be my girlfriend to help me close a deal in New York. I believe she’s about to discover exactly how I roll when I know what I want. And what I want is her.

I didn’t know I was pregnant. Ayden walked away from me a decade ago and never looked back. The only thing he left me was our sweet, amazing daughter. And a mile-long list of small town secrets. When his father—the town’s mayor—threatens me, Ayden’s childhood best friend steps in. And I have no choice but to fight the battles he ran away from.

Eight years ago, Declan Gilroy pushed his way into my life and made himself at home. Made me believe he was different. Made me love him. Then he destroyed me. Left me. Broke my heart. I'll never forgive him for it. Never. I've spent the last eight years watching him move on. Living his life like what he did to me meant nothing. Like I meant nothing. He might not love me anymore, but he still wants me. That much I'm sure of. I can see it in the way he looks at me. Feel it in the way he kisses me. I've waited eight long years to get even, and it's finally here. The chance to make him hurt.

Nicholas Sparks, best selling author of A Bend in the Road and A Walk to Remember, returns with this touching tale of two vulnerable people who find love in the eye of a storm.

A historic western that opens in 1873, a time when recession is forcing thousands westwards to recoup their fortunes. The West is tough, brutal and the Indian is the enemy. But when a white woman is raped, it is a half-breed Cheyenne who comes to the rescue. From the author of Jake and Upland Passage.

I've loved Sofie Copewell for as long as I can remember. She was all I ever wanted. We said someday we'd have a family together and raise them on our ranch in Landmark Mountain. She was my home. My forever. I spent my whole life chasing her, hanging on her every word and lighting up when she smiled at me. And I never had a single doubt that she felt the same way. Until she left and didn't come back… For eight years. Now she's returned, and I'm resentful and want answers. Answers to why she left without a goodbye, taking all our dreams with her.

In a small, unnamed town in the American South, a church congregation arrives for a service and finds a figure asleep on a pew. The person is genderless and racially ambiguous and refuses to speak. One family takes in the strange visitor and nicknames them Pew. As the town spends the week preparing for a mysterious Forgiveness Festival, Pew is shuttled from one household to the next. The earnest and seemingly well-meaning townspeople see conflicting identities in Pew, and many confess their fears and secrets to them in one-sided conversations.

Once a gifted ballet dancer, Julia Costell buckled under the demands of a professional dance career, and has landed with a thud in an unglamorous job as a guidance counselor at a performing arts high school. Living back home with her parents and feeling lost, she is afraid she’ll never soar again...until the day young Dell Jordan is sent to her office, carrying an essay. In Dell’s writing, Julia sees luminous sparks of hope. But as she fights to forge a brighter future for one disadvantaged student, she's drawn into startling undercurrents of conflict and denial within the academy.

Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, is storytelling at its most generous. Nobody’s Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and Melody Griffith.

Molly Wells is keeping a lot of secrets, such as why she's stolen her ex-husband's expensive stallion and driven him hundreds of miles to the ranch of horse whisperer Jake Coulter and why she's arrived with no job, no money, and an all-consuming fear. Molly may be willing to risk everything to save the stallion, but it's herself she really needs to save. By making a place for Molly on his ranch, Jake suspects that he may be harboring a thief. But there's something about this courageous, yet vulnerable, woman that tugs on his heartstrings.

Paisley Ratchford is trying to keep it together, but in eight weeks, the Toronto apartment building she lives in will be demolished. A last-ditch effort to reclaim her abandoned childhood home on Amherst Island plunges Paisley into memories of growing up in the tight-knit community, and into the obsessive compulsive disorder that has only ever offered a semblance of control. Her compulsion to count in sets of eight had little effect on thwarting bullies, her father’s bad luck, and her mother’s mental illness—all of which return to haunt her.

Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he’s landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office.

Twenty miles across the North Dakota border, where the scenery goes from rolling grass prairie to pipeline fields, detective Cassie Dewell has been assigned as the new deputy sheriff of Grimstad - a place people used to be from but were never headed to. Grimstad is now the oil capital of North Dakota. With oil comes money, with money comes drugs, and with drugs come the dirtiest criminals hustling to corner the market.

When her late grandfather’s dying deputy calls Mercy to his side, she and Elvis inherit the cold case that haunted him - and may have killed him. But finding Beth Kilgore 20 years after she disappeared is more than a lost cause. It’s a Pandora’s box releasing a rain of evil on the very people Mercy and Elvis hold most dear. With her grandmother Patience gone missing and Elvis’s future uncertain, Mercy faces the prospect of losing her most treasured allies, the only ones she believes truly love and understand her.

Danniella is running from her past, so when she arrives at the beautiful seaside resort of Whitsborough Bay, the last thing on her mind is making friends. Alison is fun, caring and doesn't take herself too seriously. But beneath the front, she is a lost soul. Karen's romance has taken a back seat to her fitness business. But she doesn’t want to give up on love quite yet. When the women meet at their local bootcamp, a deep friendship blossoms. And soon they realise that the secret to happiness is where they least expected to find it....