Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and a young niece, Ruth. An Oprah Book Club selection and bestseller in hardcover, Drowning Ruth, now in paperback, is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart. Schwarz's first novel explores...

Set mainly in Ireland on a dairy farm, Blessed Are the Cheesemakers tells the story of two old men, Joseph "Corrie" Corrigan and Joseph "Fee" Feehan who are the best cheesemakers in the world, and the broken hearted women and whisky-soaked men they rescue in the course of their daily doing. There's a love story, a family story, the lore of cheese-making (fiction or not), and some wonderfully appealing characters, including the cows which only give...

New York Times best-selling author Jon Katz has written a successful series of mystery novels, nonfiction works, and a popular fiction series based on his experiences with the dogs on his farm. In Rose in a Storm, Rose is a working dog devoted to keeping the sheep and other creatures at Bedlam Farm out of danger. But as the weather grows cold, Rose senses danger-a storm unlike any she's seen. When an epic blizzard finally strikes, Rose needs all her...

The 1880s story of a Norwegian family drawn to America by the promise of untold wealth. They go through the tenements of New York, make the dangerous journey overland to North Dakota and labor to carve out a homestead before the arrival of the dreaded winter. The Bjorklunds never dreamed they would face such hardship.

Even before the Great Depression struck, Jeeter Lester and his family were desperately poor sharecroppers, but when hard times begin to affect the families that once helped support them, the Lesters slip completely into the abyss. Rather than hold on to each other for support, Jeeter, his wife Ada, and their twelve children are overcome by the fractured and violent society around them.

'The best thing I've done is My Antonia,' recalled Willa Cather. 'I feel I've made a contribution to American letters with that book.' Set against the vast Nebraska prairie, Cather's elegiac novel features one of the most winning heroines in American fiction—Antonia Shimerda—a young woman whose strength and passion epitomize the triumphant vitality of this country's pioneers.
'If, as is often said, every novelist is born...