Twelve-year-old Della Kelly of Maryville, North Carolina, tries to come to terms with her mother's mental illness while her father struggles to save the farm from a record-breaking drought.

"Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and eleven-year-old Robert, on their small subsistence farm. They do not support the Confederacy's position on slavery, but Joetta considers her family to be neutral, believing this is simply not their fight. Her opinion...

Ginny, who marries Tom at the turn of the century after her family has given up on her ever marrying, narrates THE TRUEST PLEASURE--the story of their life together on her father's farm in the western North Carolina mountains. They have a lot in common--love of the land and fathers who fought in the Civil War. Tom's father died in the war, but Ginny's father came back to western North Carolina to hold on to the farm and turn a profit. Ginny's was...

This Stunning Novel is set near the end of the Civil War in the mountainous farm country of North Carolina-bordering on the Hiwassee River-a region where neighbor turned on neighbor and helpless families were preyed on by deserters from both armies and by violent gangs pretending to be military units. Madison Curtis and his wife Sarah live on a plantation that lies in the path of a gang of Union partisans, led by a vicious bushwhacker named Bridgeman....

When her veterinarian father dies, sixteen-year-old Iris Wight must move from Maine to North Carolina where her Aunt Sue spends Iris's small inheritance while abusing her physically and emotionally, but the hardest to take is her mistreatment of the farm animals.

In late middle-age, Harry Kavros and his wife, Peri, pack up all the household belongings that will fit into their car and leave Manhattan, bound for their new home on a twenty-two-acre patch of pine-filled land in Hillsborough, North Carolina. As Mr. Kavros spends long hours clearing the acreage, not for farming but for sightlines, he muses about the land, the exhausting work it requires, and the rewards the effort offers. Every task he undertakes...