The classic novel of a Georgia family undone by the Great Depression: “[A] story of force and beauty” (New York Post). Even before the Great Depression struck, Jeeter Lester and his family were desperately poor sharecroppers. But when hard times begin to affect the families that once helped support them, the Lesters slip completely into the abyss. Rather than hold on to each other for support, Jeeter, his wife Ada, and...

In 1936, a young mother resting by the side of a road in Central California is spontaneously photographed by a woman documenting the migrant laborers who have taken to America's farms in search of work. Little personal information is exchanged, and neither woman has any way of knowing that they have produced what will become the most iconic image of the Great Depression. Three vibrant characters anchor the narrative of Mary Coin. Mary, the migrant...

A marked departure from Edith Wharton's usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife's young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by...

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

A 13-year-old girl in 1956 Georgia is obliged to look after her twin brothers and a baby sister because the mother is busy with boyfriends. When a man takes advantage of the absence of adults in the house by raping the girl she kills him, the crime camouflaged with the help of a neighbor. By the author of Whistle.

"When thirteen-year-old Lora tells her parents that she wants to join Premier Castro's army of young literacy teachers, her mother screeches to high heaven, and her father roars like a lion. Lora has barely been outside of Havana -- why would she throw away her life in a remote shack with no electricity, sleeping on a hammock in somebody's kitchen? But Lora is stubborn: didn't her parents teach her to share what she has with someone in need? Surprisingly,...

The trials of the four Scurvy children of Georgia to find the money to bury their mother who died giving birth to her fifth child. Since the two eldest, Pee-Wee and Buck, are good-for-nothing types and Alamand is a dreamer the task befalls to Loujean, the realist. By the author of Pawpaw Patch.

Set in rural New England, "Ethan Frome" is the story of its title character who marries Zenobia, a nagging hypochondriac of a woman, and finds himself trapped in an unfulfilling life. When Zenobia's young cousin Mattie Silver comes to live with them, Frome falls in love with her. "Ethan Frome" is the story of forbidden love and its tragic consequences. In "Summer" we have the story of the sexual awakening of a young woman, Charity Royall. Charity,...

In the rural South, Cliffie Flowers, 17, becomes pregnant by the local good-for-nothing. Not wanting to spoil her chances of a marriage by turning him in, she fingers the local preacher when her father asks who did it. A tale of lies and murder by the author of Going Through the Change.