In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, Diane English Stiftel, her brother Floyd, and her parents are throwing a barbecue to celebrate her son's engagement. On this gorgeous, magical night, the bride's father, Alejandro Cambria, a wealthy power broker and one of Chicago's celebrated elite, discovers the limits and possibilities of cell phone range. Meanwhile, mother of the bride, Susan Kennedy Cambria, who dabbles in public relations and believes herself...

Family patriarch Walter Langdon has died, and his children have fanned out across the country. The narrative moves year by year from 1953 to 1986, encompassing Cold War blinkeredness, Sixties rebellion, and escalating wealth into the Eighties.

"In this lush, shimmering and wildly imaginative debut novel, a young mother returns after twenty years to her estranged family of women in Appalachia, renowned for their ability to call upon the magic of the land to solve the community's woes-but when a local predatory teacher is found dead in the woods, it seems the women conjured something more sinister"--

"In a secessionist rural state that has cut itself off completely from urban centers, where living is hardscrabble and poor but "free," Brooke Holland runs a farm with her husband, Milo, and two daughters. Their life at the fringes of modern society is tenuous - they make barely enough from each harvest to keep going - yet Brooke cherishes the loving, peaceful life they have carved out for themselves. She has even begun to believe she is free from...

Celia Scott and her family move back to her husband's hometown in Kansas, where his sister died under mysterious circumstances twenty years before, and where Celia and two of her children struggle to adjust--especially when a local girl disappears.

"When Kate Bowman temporarily moves to her grandmother's Missouri farm with her husband and baby son, she learns that the lessons that most enrich our lives often come unexpectedly. The family has given Kate the job of convincing Grandma Rose, who's become increasingly stubborn and forgetful, to move off her beloved land and into a nursing home. But Kate knows such a change would break her grandmother's heart. Just when Kate despairs of finding answers,...

A Penguin Classic
In Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck’s beautifully rendered depictions of small yet fateful moments that transform ordinary lives, these twelve early stories introduce both the subject and style of artistic expression that recur in the most important works of his career. Each of these self-contained stories is linked to the others by the presence of the Munroes, a family whose misguided behavior and lack of sensitivity...

On a primitive farm on the margins of an upstate New York town, three Proctor brothers live together in a kind of crumbling stasis--until one of them dies in his sleep and the other two are suspected of murder. A deeply intimate saga of the human condition at its limits.

A mysterious virus has infiltrated the good people of Lake Wobegon, transmitted via unpasteurized cheese made by a Norwegian bachelor farmer, the effect of which is episodic loss of social inhibition. Mayor Alice, Father Wilmer, Pastor Liz, the Bunsens and Krebsbachs, formerly taciturn elders, burst into political rants, inappropriate confessions, and rhapsodic proclamations, while their teenagers watch in amazement. Meanwhile, a wealthy outsider...

The first of three kindred novels set in the American Midwest of the 1920s from national bestselling author Dorothy Garlock's.
At 21, Julie Jones is convinced that life is passing her by. Her mother's death four years ago left her in charge of caring for her father and five siblings, and dashed her hopes of meeting that special someone who would whisk her away to the glamorous big city. Then all at once, Julie's predictable existence is...