Anthill

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Ed Tarkington · 336 pages

Welcome to Spencerville, Virginia, 1977. A time when teenagers roamed wild and free. When sons worshipped God, loved their mothers, and feared their fathers. And when eight-year-old Rocky still worshipped his older brother, Paul--sixteen and full of rebel cool--who was happy to have his younger brother as his sidekick, until one day things went terribly wrong and Paul disappeared. Seven years late

The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

Christopher Scotton · 480 pages

"After witnessing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, 14-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events of this fateful summer wil

Crazy in Alabama

Mark Childress · 383 pages

The tale of Peejoe, an orphan boy who comes of age during a racially restless summer in the Alabama, and his aunt Lucille, who jumps at the chance to escape her life for a role on the "Beverly Hillbillies."

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys

Chris Fuhrman · 200 pages

Set in Savannah, Georgia, in the early 1970s, this is a novel of youth, its anarchic joy, and its first encounters with the concerns and apprehensions of early adulthood. Francis Doyle, Tim Sullivan, and their three closest friends are altar boys at Blessed Heart Catholic Church and eight-grade classmates at the parish school. They are also inveterate pranksters, suburban Tom Saywers. Bright, art

The Whisper of the River

Ferrol Sams · 528 pages

My Sunshine Away

M.O. Walsh · 306 pages

A man reflects on the summer of his fourteenth year, where in Baton Rouge he fell in love with a golden-haired girl across the street before an unspeakable crime shattered illusions in his seemingly idyllic neighborhood. 1989. In a Baton Rouge neighborhood best known for cookouts on sweltering summer afternoons, Lindy Simpson-- track star, and belle of the block-- experiences a horrible crime. It

The Great Santini

Pat Conroy · 475 pages

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver · 560 pages

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in hi

Girls in Trucks

Katie Crouch · 276 pages

Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks.)But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as

Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · 338 pages

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori

The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster

Kaye Gibbons · 218 pages

This sequel to Gibbon's beloved classic Ellen Foster stands on its own as an unforgettable portrait of a redoubtable adolescent making herself up out of whole cloth. Now fifteen, Ellen is settled into a permanent home with a new mother. Strengthened by adversity and blessed with enough intelligence to design a salvation for herself, she still feels ill at ease in the world. Her sole surviving ritu

The Education of Dixie Dupree

Donna Everhart · 352 pages

Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward · 274 pages

They heard it on the radio. A hurricane is coming, threatening the town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Esch's hard-drinking father can feel it in his bones. Esch and her brothers are trying to help prepare, but there are other worries too. Skeetah is watching his prized pit bull, helpless as her new litter dies one by one. Randall, when not preoccupied with basketball, is busy looking after the you

Baby of the Family

Tina McElroy Ansa · 265 pages

Where All Light Tends to Go

David Joy · 289 pages

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

Geronimo Rex

Barry Hannah · 381 pages

Harry Monroe leaves his Louisiana hometown to travel around the South of the 1950s and 60s.

Bastard Out of Carolina

Dorothy Allison · 309 pages

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.

A Soft Place to Land

Susan Rebecca White

A Quiet Belief in Angels

R.J. Ellory · 374 pages

Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man

Fannie Flagg · 336 pages

A Walk to Remember

Nicholas Sparks · 240 pages

There was a time when the world was sweeter....when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats.... Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the s

Blue Hole Back Home

Joy Jordan-Lake · 303 pages

Where the Heart Is

Billie Letts · 368 pages

Talk about unlucky sevens. An hour ago, seventeen-year-old, seven months pregnant Novalee Nation was heading for California with her boyfriend. Now she finds herself stranded at a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, with just $7.77 in change. But Novalee is about to discover hidden treasures in this small Southwest town--a group of down-to-earth, deeply caring people willing to help a homeless, jobles

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · 330 pages