When I was five years old, our reward for not squirming in church was a pony ride in a small dirt ring. Although it wasn’t until I was out on my own and working before I could take riding lessons, I never forgot the joy that aged, tired pony gave me. I soon bought my first horse, eventually moved to a horse farm, and never looked back. My novels are mostly mysteries set in the equestrian world, but they focus on the healing power of horses in the lives of characters facing complex and sometimes dangerous family situations.
You know this is going to be a great book from the author who treated us to other historical adventures such as The Color of Lightning, Enemy Women, and News of the World. Jiles has the skills to recreate a period in time so tangible, the reader feels like they've been dropped through a time portal, and Stormy Weather is no exception. Set during the darkest years of the depression, a woman and her daughters battle cruel hardships alone on an abandoned farm, relying and setting their hopes on their only legacy—a dangerous, rogue racehorse named Smoky Joe. It is a story of personal strength and desperate dreams, pinned on the back of a horse. I love a story about women with grit, hope, and a tenacious will to succeed.
Oil is king of East Texas during the darkest years of the Great Depression. The Stoddard girls—responsible Mayme, whip-smart tomboy Jeanine, and bookish Bea—know no life but an itinerant one, trailing their father from town to town as he searches for work on the pipelines and derricks. But in a year of devastating drought and dust storms, the family's fortunes sink further than they ever anticipated when a questionable "accident" leaves the girls and their mother, Elizabeth, alone to confront the cruelest hardships of these hardest of times.
Returning to their previously abandoned family farm, the resilient Stoddard women must…
I loved this book as one of the most beautifully crafted and intimate inward and outward journeys of a character I have ever read.
John Chenneville is seriously wounded at the end of the Civil War and, upon his return to his beautiful Creole St. Louis home, learns that his beloved sister, baby, and husband have been viciously murdered. His relentless search takes him through Oklahoma tribal lands and war-ravaged Texas, where he is confronted with the worst and best of humanity.
The author’s descriptions of scenes and characters are stunning, and I was sent through an entire succession of emotions, from laughing to anger to crying.
The main character is determined to murder the man who murdered his sister and her family, yet his integrity shows through in every thought and action. The unexpected end is perfect.
Consumed with grief, driven by vengeance, a man undertakes an unrelenting odyssey across the lawless post-Civil War frontier seeking redemption in this fearless novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of News of the World.
Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John's beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered.
I am a policy advocate, grassroots activist, university professor, and author committed to social change—at scale—to advance social work values of racial, economic, environmental, and social justice. Recognizing that most social workers are drawn to our profession because they want to make a difference in the lives of their clients, one by one, I invest my energies and skills to making policy study and practice accessible, relevant, and urgent. My students quickly get used to noting the book recommendations I sprinkle throughout class discussions and in assignment feedback, because when you see the world through a social policy frame, everything has a policy implication!
Social work students are people people, so even with the interactive cases and vignettes that connect policy knowledge to practice, it can be difficult for students planning for a career in interpersonal therapy or crisis intervention to connect emotionally to complex policy topics like Social Security reform, net-zero carbon emissions, or criminal justice reform.
Barnett’s non-fiction title on the latter topic is page-turning and infused with heart. It also relates her activism and community organizing, in service of advancing justice in policing and corrections.
This part of her story helps students see how they, too, can take actions—even as an individual—that bear witness to our values and advance toward a vision of social change.
LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE • A “powerful and devastating” (The Washington Post) call to free those buried alive by America’s legal system, and an inspiring true story about unwavering belief in humanity—from a gifted young lawyer and important new voice in the movement to transform the system.
“An essential book for our time . . . Brittany K. Barnett is a star.”—Van Jones, CEO of REFORM Alliance, CNN Host, and New York Times bestselling author
Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her…
Finn O’Donnell is a hero, an Afghanistan veteran, and an Army sniper who buys a ranch in Texas and plans to settle down for a peaceful life.
That changes when his former spotter, Callie Brewster, arrives seeking a place to stay, seeking safety for herself and her young nephew.
Both suffer some PTSD, which I’ve written about. It’s a subject very meaningful to me because one of my grandfathers, a Missouri farm boy, served in the Pacific during World War II, primarily in the Philippines, and came home with PTSD, although it was not yet called such. His experiences affected the rest of his life, and so reading another work with characters working through the same caught my heart.
I rejoiced for the characters, wept with them, and became very involved in their story. I wished it could continue and not end.
New York Times bestselling author Carolyn Brown introduces readers to the world of Burnt Boot, Texas, in this beloved holiday cowboy romance.
All he wants for Christmas is peace and quiet…
After two tours in Afghanistan, retired Army sniper Finn O'Donnell believes his new ranch outside the sleepy little town of Burnt Boot, Texas, is the perfect place for an undisturbed holiday season. But before this brave cowboy can settle in, an old friend shows up looking for protection and a place where nobody knows her name.
I’m the author of The Dirty Parts of the Bible, which has
been a #1 Kindle bestseller in Humorous Literary Fiction on several occasions. In school, I hated the sorts of novels we were assigned. Unable to connect
with them, I read Cliff’s Notes instead. Then we were given The Catcher in the Rye. It was a
revelation—literature can be relatable, engaging, and funny?! The next novel to grab me this way was The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. Like Catcher, it was gritty and often dark,
addressing serious concerns—but it did so with humor. These books were
my gateway into enjoying fiction—and, ultimately, to writing my own story in
the same category of serious-yet-funny.
This is a little-known gem by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder (best known for his play Our Town). Published in the 1935, it’s a contemporaneous account of Depression-era America, following the misadventures of traveling salesman and religious zealot, George Brush.
Coming off as preachy and self-righteous, George sparks ire and outrage wherever he goes. Yet, he’s a sincere and decent person. At the end of his misadventures, George is humbled and begins to broaden his views, making him a complex, sympathetic character.
Though renowned during his lifetime, Wilder has been largely forgotten in favor of flashier contemporaries. All of his works are worth rediscovering, but Heaven’s My Destination is closest to my heart as it was a major inspiration for my own book.
The law of contract is ripe for feminist analysis. Despite increasing calls for the re-conceptualisation of neo-classical ways of thinking, feminist perspectives on contract tend to be marginalised in mainstream textbooks. This edited collection questions the assumptions made in such works and the ideologies that underpin them, drawing attention to the ways in which the law of contract has facilitated the virtual exclusion of women, the feminine and the private sphere from legal discourse.
Contributors to this volume offer a range of ways of thinking about the subject and cover topics such as the feminine offeree, feminist perspectives on contracts…
I have always been a history lover, but often find myself thinking about the untold stories. The people who were not writing the history books or commanding armies or ruling countries. I’ve always been more inspired by everyday people, especially women, who fought daily battles we know very little about. I find myself seeking out their stories. I love to imagine these women’s lives. What motivated them, what frightened them, what angered them. That’s what I’m most passionate about. Finding and telling their stories.
Valentine handles some very heavy topics beautifully.
Many of the characters are connected by only one thread: they are women trying to survive in West Texas in the early 1970s. It centers around a brutal incident and the quest to find justice for a Mexican teenage girl who was violently assaulted.
Throughout the story we get such an intimate look at these women’s lives. I felt like I knew them. I felt like I was sitting right next to them in their kitchen or on their front porch.
These women were all hardened by the trials life had thrown at them, and were battling the urge to protect themselves with the urge to protect one another. I loved this book because it was just so honest.
A top ten New York Times bestseller. With the haunting emotional power of American Dirt and the atmospheric suspense of Where the Crawdads Sing: a compulsive debut novel that explores the aftershock of a brutal crime on the women of a small Texas oil town.
'The very definition of a stunning debut' Ann Patchett
'Brilliant, sharp, tightly wound, and devastating' Elizabeth Gilbert
'Quite simply one of the best books I've ever read' Jeanine Cummins,
author of American Dirt
Mercy is hard in a place like this. I wished him dead before I ever saw his face...
I’ve always liked to imagine how things might have been. In my thinking, a good historical novel is a story set inside the larger world of the time, like a nesting doll with a story inside a story. I look for accurate research, well-developed characters, a unique storyline, and dialogue that comes alive on the page. I expect the history to be a backdrop for a story of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. This is what I like to read and how I have written my novels set during the Civil War, Great Sioux Uprising of 1862, and the home front of World War 2.
The Time It Never Rained tells the grim battle between ranchers and drought in 1950s western Texas.
I grew up on a small Minnesota farm and remember my father’s struggle to keep the farm going, but at least he never faced a seven-year drought. A stubborn rancher who reminded me of my father, refuses to give in or ask for help.
I especially liked the secondary story of illegal immigrants, attitudes of ranchers toward the Feds tasked with arresting and deporting them, and the government programs that backfired in the end. It’s an excellent read that left me thankful for every drop of rain and blade of green grass. Its lessons of racism and kindness are pertinent to today’s world.
In the 1950s, West Texas suffered the longest drought in the memory of most men then living. By that time, Charlie Flagg, the central character of this novel, was one of a dying breed of men who wrested their living from the harsh land of West Texas. The struggle made them fiercely independent, a trait personified in Charlie’s persistence throughout the seven dry years, his refusal to accept defeat, his opposition to federal aid programs and their inevitable bureaucratic regulations, his determination to stay on the land he loves and respects even as he suffers with that land. Charlie is…
I read all kinds of romance books, and this slow-burn historical western caught my attention because the heroine is more interested in creating a name for herself as a newspaperman than she is in finding a man.
Also, she’s an excellent gambler and gives her winnings to the impoverished people of her community, almost like Robin Hood. For a woman to thrive in a male-oriented workplace and to gamble, which is strictly a pastime only for men, well...this had me hooked!
I was so worried for Everleigh, the heroine, because her scandalous actions could lead to her downfall, but I cheered for each of her successes. This is a great story about female empowerment and finding love with someone who respects you for who you are.
Everleigh Camden has upset her mother. She has chosen a profession over marriage. But Everleigh intends to get hitched someday. She just wants some experiences before she settles down, which includes being the secretary to an attorney, and using her winnings from nightly poker games to form the anonymous, charitable persona, "Bets Gamble".
However, when a new partner joins the law office, he brings his unwelcome ideas and shocking orders to help him catch the Shooter Creek Bandits.
Wade Bennett, sour on marriage and orderly to a fault, moves to Houston with the intent of catching the…
I have loved crime fiction since encountering it in college. After seeing the Bogart-Bacall version of The Big Sleep, I read the underlying Raymond Chandler novel and was hooked. I devoured Chandler’s other works and moved on to James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald, and others. Later I discovered the crime novels of Charles Williams, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, and other “pulp masters.” Loving those novels led me to try my hand at writing crime fiction, and Stark House Press has now published five of my novels with another on the way. My crime-writing career is an unusual path for someone whose M.A. thesis is on Jane Austen!
I think The Hot Spot is perhaps the best of several noir novels by Charles Williams, a writer who deserves to be better known.
Originally published as Hell Hath No Fury, The Hot Spot, well filmed under that title in 1990, chillingly illustrates the claimed truth of the proverb about a woman scorned. As readers, we cannot help but like Harry Madox, a clever but semi-sleazy used-car salesman who robs a bank in a small Texas town and sleeps with his boss’s boozy wife before falling in love with a younger, more innocent woman.
Then Harry learns to his dismay that the boss’s wife is determined to keep him from having the things he now realizes he really wants. Re-reading this novel, I always root for Harry to escape from the deep pit he has dug for himself, and I keep turning the pages, hoping he will.
A dark, brooding masterpiece of guilt, greed, and lust in a town ripe for felony.
Madox wasn't all bad. He was just half-bad. But trap a man like Madox in a dead-end job in a stultifying small town, introduce him to a femme fatale like the Harshaw woman, and give him a shot at a fast fifteen thousand dollars--in a bank just begging to be knocked over--and his better nature doesn't stand a chance.
Merciless in its suspense, flawless in its grasp of the ways in which ordinary people hurtle over the edge, The Hot Spot is a superb example…
As a degreed socio-linguist and international educator, my novel writing has been immersed in the human experience that began early on as a teen musician immersed naively in a non-mainstream world of creatives and cons, when the word 'counterculture' was perceived more as a renaissance than the drug-laden world of darker gatherings that it later came to be known as. Boulder Blues is a work of fiction drawn from both fantasy and personal exposure. From there I went on to teach in American alternative education and later at university with a focus on rhetoric and forensic writing. My draw to other cultures and their perspectives moved me to go on to teach internationally.
This American classic by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Larry McMurtry, is read by university students worldwide. It’s set in its own time of indulgent decadence where little value is placed on the lives of individuals met by Danny Deck, the sad-sack protagonist, who denigrates his published work to the point of tearing up a copy of the novel he carries with him before drowning his own sorry self in the river of the Rio Grande. Yet, Danny is as much at fault for the sloppy treatment of the company he keeps as his company is for being disingenuous.
What McMurtry calls normal life, or mundane happiness, through the voice of novelist Deck, is seen as obtainable if one wants to pursue the creative arts. His conclusion is that the two simply don’t mix. As he explores this idea in a higgledy-piggledy fashion, Deck sets about self-destructing, which has nothing to do…
Hailed as one of "the best novels ever set in America's fourth largest city" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry's "comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension" (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the "mundane happiness" of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, "El Chevy," bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable…
