In the years after World War I the Hess family attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.

In the fictional New England town of Starkfield, an unnamed narrator is forced to stay at the home of Ethan Frome during a winter storm. He relates his encounter with Frome, "the most striking figure in Starkfield, he was but the ruin of a man, with a careless powerful look - in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain". When the beautiful cousin of Frome's bitter wife comes to help with housekeeping, Frome's attraction to her...

"In 1910, Signe, her husband, and their boys emigrate from Norway to Minnesota, dreaming of one day owning a farm of their own. But the relatives they've come to stay with are harsh and demanding. As Signe's family is worked to the bone to repay the cost of their voyage, can she learn to trust God through this trial and hold on to hope for a better future?"--

When her grandfather's health begins to decline, Havyn is determined to keep her family together. But everyone has secrets--including John, the hired stranger who recently arrived on their farm. To help out Havyn starts singing at a local roadhouse--but dangerous eyes grow jealous as she and John grow closer. Will they realize the peril before it is too late?

"By July 1914, the ties between Kezia Marchant and Thea Brissenden, friends since girlhood, have become strained--by Thea's passionate embrace of women's suffrage, and by the imminent marriage of Kezia to Thea's brother, Tom, who runs the family farm. When Kezia and Tom wed just a month before war is declared between Britain and Germany, Thea's gift to Kezia is a book on household management--a veiled criticism of the bride's prosaic life to come....

A young woman, looking back on her childhood, recounts her farm family's poverty, her father's cowardice, and her younger brother's obsession for digging tunnels and living underground.

"Alden Forth was raised to believe that she could never have true love. So each year, when the peaches ripen on her farm, she takes a lover, only to let him go after a few short weeks. This is until the summer she finds her simple way of life threatened as her grandfather, her last surviving relative, descends into dementia. The arrival of a revivalist minister further upsets the balance in Alden's rural hometown, for the minister's vehemence to save...

"Trinidad in the 1940s, nearing the end of American occupation and British colonialism. On a hill overlooking Bell Village sits the Changoor farm, where Dalton and Marlee Changoor live in luxury unrecognizable to those who reside in the farm's shadow. Down below is the barrack, a ramshackle building ... divided into rooms occupied by whole families. Among these families are the Saroops--Hans, Shweta, and their son, Krishna, all three born of the barracks....

When irascible farmer Guy Beardon meets a very dirty death in his own farmyard, at first it seems like an accident – despite the fact that he was widely disliked. Only his daughter suspects foul play. Suspicion becomes certainty when two more deaths occur – and both of them are unmistakably murder… It had already been a spring laden with mortality. News reports were full of terrorist bombings, earthquakes and floods, and a whole herd of prime...

In the rural farm country of northern Ontario, the lives of two families--the farming Pye family, and zoologist Kate Morrison and her three brothers--are brought together and torn apart by misunderstanding, resentment, family love, and tragedy. Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch perfect, you know from the opening page that this is the real thing-a literary experience in which to lose yourself, by an...