"From now on, there are bound to be two classics of the Great Depression— The Grapes of Wrath and Hardcastle." — Los Angeles TimesIn 1931 William Music is making his way back home to Virginia when he hops off a freight train in Switch County, Kentucky, to find something to eat. For eleven cents—all the money in his pocket—he buys a soda bottle's worth of moonshine. Farther down the road, he takes two turnips and a handful of string beans f...

A powerhouse novel about an idealistic young man's return to a rural Southern town simmering with prejudice and angerSeparation papers in hand, Beau Jim Early sets out one hot, dry August morning in 1960 from Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for his brother's farm in Cocke County, Georgia. After six years in the army, civilian life is not as easy as it looks. In short order, Beau Jim gets conned by a shoe-shine boy, buys a Studebaker with bad brakes, and spends nearly ...

Funny, suspenseful, tender, and wise—the story of a man who took to the woods, and the woman who found him thereSoon after his fortieth birthday, Macon "Toots" Henslee left his home, his job, and his marriage to live in a tree house. Lots of people—his wife especially—thought that he had lost his mind, but from his perch atop a Tennessee riverbank, Toots could see plainly the insanity of his old life. He had become a man who said and did the opposite of what he want...

The tender, engaging story of a family in pain and a boy whose quest for courage leads him deep into the wilds of AppalachiaIn 1948 Madeline Tally leaves her philandering husband and returns home to North Carolina, where she and her thirteen-year-old son, James, move into an ugly purple trailer in the cow pasture behind her father's farmhouse. Smart and sensitive, James worries that he is somehow responsible for his parents' separation and feels out of place in the...

The stunning debut of a writer hailed by Robert Penn Warren as "that very rare thing, the born novelist"He had lost the thread of his life, and he couldn't pretend any longer that he hadn't.As soon as Thomas Rapidan thinks it, he knows it is true. The question is, what to do about it? John Yount's slim, potent first novel is the story of a troubled young man deciding whether to live or die.Tom's wife, Maggie, knows that he does not love her. S...

**Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel"Don't be fooled by the novel's apparent simplicity: What emerges from the surface is a tale of extraordinary emotional power, one of longstanding pain set against the pulsating drumbeat of social change."-Sarah Weinman, NPR.org**For twenty years, Celia Scott has watched her husband, Arthur, hide from the secrets surrounding his sister Eve's death. But when the 1967 Detroit riots frighten him even more than his Kansas p...

From the O. Henry Award–winning author of Rich Man, Poor Man , a Manhattan family is forever altered as a consequence of an act of kindness.The Strands are a happy family, save for the occasional financial struggle. Allen, the father, has a decent job as a schoolteacher, a lovely wife, and smart, ambitious, and compassionate children. When Allen's daughter witnesses a mugging, she takes the victim back to the Strand home ...

DEAR MISS WELLS: Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity, and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves. Brave woman! you have done your people an...

Set during the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, this page-turning historical novel reveals recently uncovered facts that forever change our understanding of what really happened. Narrated by a feisty young reporter, Annalisa Passarelli, the novel paints a vivid picture of the Post-Victorian city, from the mansions of Nob Hill to the underbelly of the Barbary Coast to the arrival of tenor Enrico Caruso and the Metropolitan Opera. Central to the story is the ongoing battle—fought eve...

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner: "Rivals Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as the best novel about the black experience in America since Ellison's Invisible Man" ( The Christian Science Monitor).Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington has left Philadelphia, where he is employed by a major university, to return to his hometown just north of the Mason–Dixon Line. He is there to care for Old Jack, one of the men who helped raise him when h...

"Strange and powerful. . . . the most resonant and touching love story I've read in a very long time." Lauren Groff, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Fates and Furies and The MatrixDuring WWII, teenager Evelyn Roe is sent to manage the family farm in rural North Carolina, where she finds what she takes to be a badly burned soldier on their property. She rescues him, and it quickly becomes clear he is no...

In this New York Times –bestselling saga set in nineteenth-century Ireland, a titled English family keep an estate in an era of famine and violent conflict.When Edward de Salis travels to America after the death of his first wife, he is astonished to find himself falling in love with Marguerite, a young woman many years his junior. Full of hope for the future, he returns to his Irish estate, Cashelmara, but in nineteenth-...