Catalog Search Results
1) Tobacco Road
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A tale of violence and sex among rural poor in the American South, the novel was highly controversial in its time. It is the story of Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his family, who are trapped by the bleak economic conditions of the Depression as well as by their own limited intelligence and destructive sexuality. Its tragic ending is almost foreordained by the characters' inability to change their lives. Caldwell's skillful use of dialect...
4) Nightwoods
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Charles Frazier, the author of National Book Award winning Cold Mountain, presents a new novel. In Nightwoods, Frazier envisions a late 1950s North Carolina through the eyes of Luce, a single woman who must care for the quiet twins of her murdered sister, Lily.
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The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....
6) Educated
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Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse....
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"Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There's Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can't save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his "prayer log". There's Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of...
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A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.
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The author recalls his poverty-stricken youth in Alabama in the 1960s and 70s, focusing on the extraordinary efforts of his mother to protect her sons from the violence of their father, a man scarred by war, and telling of the sacrifices she made so her children could have a better life.
13) Backlash
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The ranch country of Montana is beautiful, unforgiving, and for Colton and Denver McLean, filled with a whole lot of bad memories. It's been seven years since a fire claimed their parents' lives and drove both brothers away. Now their uncle's death has brought them back to a place where loyalty and love runs deep-but so do grudges. Suspicion still swirls about what caused that tragic fire. It created a rift between Denver and the foreman's daughter,...
14) Fortune's hand
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An opportunistic Southern lawyer compromises his ideals and exploits people to gain fame, only to be destroyed when he goes one step too far, becoming involved in bank fraud. By the author of Legacy of Silence.
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"The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police...
19) The Golden State
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In Lydia Kiesling's razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler, Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent --her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a "processing error", Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents...