The first of three kindred novels set in the American Midwest of the 1920s from national bestselling author Dorothy Garlock's.
At 21, Julie Jones is convinced that life is passing her by. Her mother's death four years ago left her in charge of caring for her father and five siblings, and dashed her hopes of meeting that special someone who would whisk her away to the glamorous big city. Then all at once, Julie's predictable existence is...

Dirt-poor, sensitive as poets, and proud as kings, the Powell family has lived on a Georgia mountaintop for generations. Then, during the 1960's, young Ursula Powell's father convinces the Tiber family, owners everything in nearby Tiberville, to commission a huge iron sculpture of a bear for the town. Decades later the strange sculpture - rejected by the townspeople and left to rust on the Powell farm - symbolizes a family's failure and thwarted dreams....

On a primitive farm on the margins of an upstate New York town, three Proctor brothers live together in a kind of crumbling stasis--until one of them dies in his sleep and the other two are suspected of murder. A deeply intimate saga of the human condition at its limits.

With a history of childhood loss and tragedy, Arliss Greene grows up to love his cattle more than his family. The memory of his family's displacement, due to TVA's construction of Norris Dam, stays with him as he struggles to make a living farming. His son Daniel tries to distance himself, but an inexplicable attachment to East Tennessee causes him to return to the hilltop where he grew up. He is shocked and disappointed when his wife, Leda, a city...

Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California along with thousands of other "Okies" seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future....

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.