"An eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in the American Midwest. During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the forces of cyclical poverty and the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country and examine the myths about...

To her parents, she's Victoria Iphigenia. To her friends, she's Vic. But to clients seeking her talents as a detective, she's V.I. And her new case will lead her from her native Chicago... and into Kansas, on the trail of a vanished film student and a faded Hollywood star. Accompanied by her dog, V.I. tracks her quarry through a university town, across fields where missile silos once flourished -- and into a past riven by long-simmering racial tensions,...

"Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly. She knows how to lance a boil, make a pie crust, butcher a pig, and tend to every chore that needs doing. What she doesn't know, but is forced to reckon with all too soon, is how to look after children as a mother should ...When Polly succumbs to a long illness, Bertie takes on responsibility for her four younger...

In her stunning debut novel, Janice Graham creates a love story that rises from the ashes of despair. Rich with passion and triumph, Firebird goes beyond romance to become a tale of greater challenges and revelations. Ethan, a young Kansas lawyer, is trapped between the demands of his fiance and his growing love for an exotic visitor to his small town. Suddenly, when tragedy strikes, Ethan is plunged into despair. But even as he mourns, strange forces...

When the farm community of Medicine Creek, Kansas, is terrorized by a series of disturbing murders, FBI agent Pendergast discovers a link between a moonshine operation and an unsolved killing from more than 150 years earlier.

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.

"During Sarah Smarsh's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, the country's changing economic policies solidified her family's place among the working poor. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves, Smarsh challenges us to examine the class divide in our country and the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less. Her personal history affirms the corrosive impact intergenerational poverty...

"On the 1880s Kansas prairie, Silas and Kate both harbor resentment over their previous failed mail-order engagements, but when a young boy loses his mother and needs their help, they must attempt to move beyond past hurts and find healing together"--

RJ Evans, a geologist for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, begins a new job in a small farming town ravaged by the Dust Bowl, where drought and over-plowing have turned the once-lush plains into a brutal twin of the Sahara; and befriends Woody, an autistic savant born in an era long before any medical diagnosis would explain his peculiar ways and unique talents.