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....

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.

In Gibbons's classic tale, a resourceful young heroine finds herself in the gloomy, overwrought world of a Hardy or Bronte novel and proceeds to organize everyone out of their romantic tragedies into the pleasures of normal life. Flora Poste, orphaned at 19, chooses to live with relatives at Cold Comfort Farm in Sussex, where cows are named Feckless, Aimless, Pointless, and Graceless, and the proprietors, the dour Starkadder family, are tyrannized...

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....

My dear Beth, Though Uppsala, Iowa, takes its name from a city in my native Sweden, life here is different from what I have known. With my parents' blessing, I have taken employment in the home of Mr. Bridger, a dairy farmer, caring for his ill mother and two young, orphaned nieces. It is most unlike me to leave home, even in a temporary manner. But the need is great and Hattie Bridger and the children are so endearing. As for Dirk Bridger, he is...

After a wait of over ten years, Karola Breit finally receives word from her betrothed in America to join him, but then she discovers that he's a recent widower with two children.

"An epic novel that spans thirty years in the lives of a farm family in Iowa, telling a parallel story of the changes taking place in America from 1920 through the early 1950s"--Provided by publisher.

A mysterious virus has infiltrated the good people of Lake Wobegon, transmitted via unpasteurized cheese made by a Norwegian bachelor farmer, the effect of which is episodic loss of social inhibition. Mayor Alice, Father Wilmer, Pastor Liz, the Bunsens and Krebsbachs, formerly taciturn elders, burst into political rants, inappropriate confessions, and rhapsodic proclamations, while their teenagers watch in amazement. Meanwhile, a wealthy outsider...

The New York Times–bestselling author paints an intimate portrait of a family's struggle to come together and protect their historic South Carolina home. Sweetgrass is a historic 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. Taxes are skyrocketing. Bulldozers are leveling the surrounding properties. And the Blakelys...