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Author
Description
Written in an incredibly compressed five-month period, the novel had an electrifying impact upon publication in 1939, unleashing a political storm with its vision of America's dispossessed struggling for survival. It continues to exert a powerful influence on American culture, and has inspired artists as diverse as John Ford, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen. Tracing the journey of the Joad family from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the migrant...
Author
Description
Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. The epic story of Catherine and Heathcliff plays out against the dramatic backdrop of the wild English moors, and presents an astonishing metaphysical vision of fate and obsession, passion and revenge. "Only Emily Brontë," V. S. Pritchett said, "exposes...
Author
Description
"From award-winning novelist Idra Novey comes a "deft and surprising novel" with two unforgettable female voices. (Rumaan Alam) Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, Take What You Need follows the estrangement and reconciliation of stepmother and daughter, Jean and Leah. Leah always felt her path diverged from Jean's and left her hometown without looking back, making a life for herself in the city as a young mother and academic. Now that...
4) Some luck
Author
Series
Description
On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn first-born; Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land; Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know; Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different; and Claire, who...
Author
Series
Description
In 1953, the Langdon family at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch, Walter, who with his wife, Rosanna, sustained their farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children, now adults, looking to the future. Only one will remain in Iowa to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, D.C., California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves out of post-World War II optimism through the darker landscape of the...
Author
Description
In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, Diane English Stiftel, her brother Floyd, and her parents are throwing a barbeque 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...
7) Golden age
Author
Series
Description
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winner: the much-anticipated final volume of her magnificent, best-selling American trilogy, which brings the beloved Langdon family into our present times and beyond. A lot can happen in 100 years, as Jane Smiley has shown to dazzling effect in her astonishing, critically acclaimed Last Hundred Years Trilogy. When Golden Age, its last installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of the Langdon family is facing economic,...
Author
Pub. Date
2011
Formats
Description
Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.
9) Bent Road
Author
Description
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.
10) Betty
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Formats
Description
"A stunning, lyrical coming-of-age novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl, with only the compass of her father's imagination, must navigate racism, sexism, and the dark secrets that will haunt her for the rest of her life. "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in Arkansas in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings....
11) I will send rain
Author
Pub. Date
2016
Description
Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934 and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma is struggling as the earliest storms of The Dust Bowl descend. All around them the wheat harvests are drying out and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains. As the Bells wait for the rains to come,...
13) English Creek
Author
Series
Description
Depicts the personal struggles of the McCaskill family in 1930s Montana as they face a forest fire, the coming of age of fourteen-year-old Jick, rodeos, and community dances.
Author
Formats
Description
Taking a sweatshop job in Seoul to support her family, a teenaged girl endures a life of extreme exploitation that contributes to Korea's economic rise in the 1970s. She works long, sunless days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer.
Author
Series
Cold Comfort Farm series volume 1
Formats
Description
A hilarious parody of D.H. Lawrence's and Thomas Hardy's earthy, melodramatic novels, the deliriously entertaining "Cold Comfort Farm" is "very probably the funniest book ever written" (The Sunday Times.).
17) Bleeding Kansas
Author
Description
The year of her 15th birthday is one that Lara Grellier will never forget. The first Gulf War is raging in the Middle East; her unstable mother has become increasingly erratic in her behavior; the townspeople in Lawrence, Kan., are leery of the two unmarried women who have moved into the area and are rumored to be Wiccans, and Lara's brother has run off to join the Army.
20) Sweetgrass
Author
Pub. Date
[2010]
Physical Desc
389 pages ; 21 cm
Description
Sweetgrass is a historical tract of land in South Carolina that has been home to the Blakely family for eight generations. But Sweetgrass -- named for the indigenous grass that grows in the area -- is in trouble. Bulldozers are leveling surrounding properties, and the Blakelys could be forced to sell the one thing that continues to hold their disintegrating family together. For some of the Blakelys, the prospect of selling Sweetgrass is bittersweet...
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