In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilt and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill -- a loveless...

A woman is falsely accused of molesting a child and goes to jail. The drama begins when Alice Goodwin, a school nurse in a small town in Wisconsin, has a moment of inattention while caring for children and one of them drowns, an occasion for the community to settle scores with an outsider. By the author of The Book of Ruth.

When Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander's car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior he survives, but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals. Into this community returns a prodigal son, Adam Leer, who may hold the key to reviving their town. -- adapted...

A kidnaping in Ohio leads two policemen to a ring which spirits away abused children. One policeman had his own daughter disappear years ago and now he learns her fate. By the author of The Last Sanctuary.

From Betty Smith, author of the beloved American classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, comes an unsentimental yet radiant and powerfully uplifting tale of young love and marriage. In 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Though only eighteen, Annie travels alone halfway across the country to the Midwestern University where Carl is studying law-and there they marry. But Carl and Annie's first year together is...

"A debut novel about an odd assortment of residents living in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest"-- The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck....

"It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless -- unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem's sister, Becky, long the social...