Gap Creek drops you into Appalachian mountain life in the nineteenth century with characters so real you forget they don’t exist. You worry about them as you turn each page.
The reader is transported to a place that truly exists. I know it. Robert’s brilliance as a writer is evident from page one. His sense of place and purpose draws us in. We experience with characters Julie and Hank a hard knock life and how the spirit triumphs against all odds. And we’re all the better for having read their story.
A New York Times Bestseller & Oprah's Book Club Pick
Young Julie Harmon works “hard as a man,” they say, so hard that at times she’s not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better.
But Julie and Hank’s new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it’s…
I am a former international banker and now a prize-winning author. My books take place in the financial world. However, my writing principle is that behind every crime is a family. In my thrillers, the crime amplifies the family dysfunction. My characters can only survive by growing and coming together. If you like character development, as well as the twists and turns of a good plot, you will like the novels that I recommend.
This is one of the few thrillers that brought tears to my eyes.
Ree, a teenage girl, must save her family by negotiating with the violent inhabitants of the Ozarks. Ree’s father has disappeared from his trial and, if she doesn’t find him, the family will lose everything they own because he pledged it as collateral for his bail bond.
I love how Woodrell portrayed her loyalty and fierceness, as well as how he wrote the deeply flawed characters who love her. His descriptions and metaphorical uses of winter and the landscape are breathtaking.
The book is literary but also has great narrative propulsion.
This is a fiercely original tale of love, heartbreak and resilience in the lonely wastes of the American Midwest. The last time Ree saw her father, he didn't bring food or money but promised he'd be back soon with a paper sack of cash and a truckload of delights. Since he left, she's had to look after her mother - sedated and losing her looks - and her two younger brothers. Ree hopes the boys won't turn out like the others in the Ozark mountains - hard and mean before they've learnt to shave. One cold winter's day, Ree discovers…
I grew up on a dairy farm on the outskirts of a town with about a hundred residents. I remember walking to town with my sister and two brothers to buy candy and rent a VHS movie from the tiny grocery store. My first job off the farm was doing dishes at the local café, where my father and the other farmers would drink coffee and read the newspaper at table 10. These experiences shaped me as a person and hooked me on small-town living. I believe it’s the people in the smallest of towns that have the biggest of hearts.
I’ve lived in Montana for over twenty years, so any books related to Montana get my attention. This book in particular, however, is so much more than just a memoir about growing up in the wilds of Big Sky Country. It’s a beautiful and poetic masterpiece that pays homage to the tiny towns and quirky community members that gave Ivan Doig a sense of home and family as a child. I enjoyed reading the familiar names of towns and mountains that I’ve grown to love during my time in Montana, and I especially appreciate how Doig shows us that the size of people’s hearts is more important than the size of their town.
National Book Award Finalist: A “beautifully written, deeply felt” memoir about growing up in the American West (Los Angeles Times).
Ivan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from his past with piercing clarity is not only a raw sense of land and how it shapes us, but also of the ties to our mothers and fathers, to those who love us, and our inextricable connection to those who shaped our values in our search for intimacy, independence, love, and family.
For many years I have enjoyed a grass roots lifestyle. I have lived my research as a beekeeper, milking cows, making cheese and growing food. I am a simple living advocate, and the cottage industry—its slower pace—resonates with me. I create bespoke yarns at the spinning wheel, but for as long as I can recall, I have been wrapped in the arms of stories. Childhood is a dandelion clock, here then gone on a breath of wind. A time of life that’s fleeting. Young hearts can conjure exploration and magic. They are alive to bright possibilities, and this is what makes YA literature so exciting.
There’s a spookiness to this historical story that pulled me in straight away. But the adventure of children soon exposes a deeper chasm of heartbreak, and the vulnerability in young lives. Here in the mountain village superstition houses fear, crippling a community at large. That parents are the guidepost for how a child perceives themselves, and how they function and see the world as adults is something to think on. The Last Sin Eater teaches us all another way to live that is filled with goodness and grace.
The New York Times bestselling author of Redeeming Love and A Voice in the Wind pens a captivating tale of suffering, seeking, and redemption set in Appalachia in the 1850s.
In the misty peaks and valleys of Appalachia roams the sin eater—a myth as much as a man, burdened with absolving the sins of villagers passing from this life to the next. But when a young girl uncovers the dark secret behind the tradition, she vows to show her village the truth.
All that matters for young Cadi Forbes is finding the one man who can set her free from…
The seventh child of a seventh son of a seventh son. Mother spoke of my sleeping nights and alert days…felt I was curious, observant. She was convinced I’d be the writer in the family. Named me Jerome after the librarian St. Jerome and Mark after Mark Twain, her favorite author as a child. Mother read to us daily, during high school time, a chapter a night. My brother Fred mailed me a word a week to look up. My freshman year in college I earned money writing compositions. And so it began. I sat on the floor and listened to the world war from Pearl Harbor to D-Day and Hiroshima.
Steinbeck can see through his character’s eyes. I get chills when he captures private moments.
Faces on pickers being pushed off land in the dustbowl during the Depression. I tasted abject poverty when supper was passed out on pie tins—one tablespoon of beans in each. Dimes were gas money to follow a dream of picking work a brochure of orange orchards in California promised, not for bread.
The hardships mesmerized me—burying Grandpa along the highway; daughter Rosasharn rocking her swaddled stillborn to ward off the suspicion of border inspectors. In an abandoned railroad car as a night’s shelter a man was dying from malnutrition.
I was moved by the statement of character when the childless momma kneeled and offered the dying man a breast letting her dead baby’s milk save him from death. Steinbeck inspired me to become a writer—this novel and his Of Mice and Men.
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
I’m a scented candles and bubble bath girl. But my love of love doesn’t intersect with chocolate-covered strawberries and champagne; it’s a circle. I’m not sure if I’m inspired to write romance because of my reality or if my reality is enriched by my writing. In any case, I enjoy a healthy love life, which, to me, is a necessity when writing realistic love or sex scenes. I’ve dated…extensively, and it’s that very experience that makes my love scenes ring true. A little bit of a past goes a long way when devising a romantic scenario or plot. Comma placement can always be learned.
I’ve loved this book since I was thirteen. Even as an adolescent, I was swept up by the romance and the tragedy.
When I read this book, I’m instantly on the Yorkshire moors, sooty clouds hovering above, watching Heathcliff, his dark hair ruffling and his tattered sleeves flapping in the brittle wind. If unrequited love is a romance trope, then this book is the unqualified architect of the genre.
I periodically dust off my copy, yellowed pages and all, for a re-read. I’m such an immersive and visual reader; I can see the torture in Heathcliff’s eyes, the despair in Isabella’s, and the denial in Cathy’s. And just when I feel the setting is too dark and gothic, Hareton Earnshaw, the character I’ve come to view as the hero, realizes justice.
One of the great novels of the nineteenth century, Emily Bronte's haunting tale of passion and greed remains unsurpassed in its depiction of destructive love. Her tragically short life is brilliantly imagined in the major new movie, Emily, starring Emma Mackey in the title role.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition of Wuthering Heights features an afterword by David Pinching.
One wild, snowy night on the Yorkshire moors, a gentleman asks…
I’ve penned (so far) seventeen novels, most set during some historical conflict or other, all of them revolving around intense personal relationships (loyalty, love, betrayal, those sorts of profound truths). I tend to read the sorts of books I wish to write. I also teach creative writing at a university (VCU); I tell my students that if they want to really know what a character is made of, shoot at them or have them fall in love. In my own work, I do both.
When Inman decides he’s had enough of the Civil War, he takes a very long walk home. Along his path, he encounters the detritus of the conflict in shattered land and people. Meanwhile, his love, Ada, tries to cobble together some remnants of her former life.
Maybe a book out of fashion these days because it’s set in the defeated South, and that I understand. However, it remains a masterclass in style, vision, plot, and insight.
In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier’s eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves.…
I’ve loved both nature and writing since childhood. My birdwatching and prior work as a geologist have taken me to the coasts, forests, and grasslands of New England, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Brazil, and beyond. Through it all, I’ve kept my pen busy writing about my adventures. A former writer-in-residence at the Shoals Marine Laboratory in Maine and beach naturalist with the Seattle Aquarium, I now teach at Smith College in Massachusetts, where I live with my family, many notebooks, and a garden full of native plants and wild birds.
Running away to live for a year alone in the woods–as a kid, I couldn’t have dreamed up a better fantasy.
Twelve-year-old protagonist Sam Gribley makes the dream feel realistic. Carving your own home in a huge hollow tree? Check. Learning how to set traps for fish and game? Check. Stitching your own clothes out of a deer hide “borrowed” from a reckless hunter who couldn’t find the carcass? Check. Learning the daily rhythms of wildlife, from chickadees to raccoons to stoats? Oh yes. I could have lived in Sam’s world forever.
Plus, the author’s line illustrations perfectly evoke an outdoor notebook worthy of a young Thoreau. It broke my heart when Sam’s year of wild freedom drew to a close.
"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."-The New York Times Book Review
Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods-all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever.
"An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year after…
I am a veteran novelist who believes this over all else: The opening is everything. This has been my modus operandi as a storyteller for over thirty books, as well as a half dozen screenplays. I love a great opening. It is how a reader or viewer will subconsciously decide whether they will devote themselves to a story. It is the first kiss. The first shot over the bow. The ignition, the countdown, and the launch. It is the alpha and omega… because the beginning dictates the ending. Oh my, how I love the beginning!
"The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted."
It’s more than a creepy opening sentence; it’s a mission statement from the Master of the Macabre, the Poet of the Paranormal, the Chaucer of Chills. It encapsulates what Stephen King does so well – a plucky little girl gets lost in the woods, a shadowy presence stalking her, and something dark, magical, and miraculous emerging from the girl’s soul.
This short novel is so riveting, you will finish it in one sitting.
From the master of horror and suspence, Stephen King, comes a pop-up adaptation of one of his bestselling novels.; Trisha MacFarland had no idea what was in store for her when she wandered away from her mother and brother on a family hike! Readers will travel with Trisha on her journey of horror, where she has only her witts for navigation, her ingenuity as a defence against the elements, and her courage and faith to withstand her mounting fear. For solace, during this terrifying journey, Trisha tuned in her walkman to listen to the broadcasts about her hero, the Red…
There is such a visceral sense of place in this book. The author clearly knows Northern Ontario's landscape well, and this small town's remoteness and isolation is as much a character in the story as the protagonist and her family.
Orphaned at a young age, the book follows Katie and her siblings as they struggle to forge a life together in a town where their tragedy is just one in a long line of them.
Paralleling the story of her youth, the book weaves in Katie's now-adult life in Toronto, where she has escaped into a life of academia. When her past and present collide, she has to face some truths about herself and the relationship she once shared with her beloved older brother, Matt.
Sibling relationships are almost always complex, whether viewed from a child's perspective or as an adult. This book combines the two in a way that…
The Morrison siblings have been haunted by tragedy since the sudden death of their parents in an accident when they were young.
Kate found an escape from the legacy of their dark past in her passion for the natural world. Now a zoologist far away from the small farming community where she grew up, she thinks she's outgrown her three brothers, who were once her entire world.
But Kate can't seem to escape her childhood or lighten the weight of their mutual past.
'I've been trying to tell everyone I know about Mary Lawson . . . Each one of…
