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So Big

Edna Ferber · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Hidden Places

Lynn Austin

Widowed ProtagonistSingle Parent ProtagonistRural FarmCharacter-Driven
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Peace Like a River

Leif Enger · 313 pages

"Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy

Father and SonSingle Parent ProtagonistRural FarmCharacter-Driven
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Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

Faith Sullivan · 447 pages

"Nell Stillman's road is not easy. When her boorish husband dies soon after they move to the small town of Harvester, Minnesota, Nell is alone, penniless yet responsible for her beloved baby boy Hillyard. Not an easy fate in small-town America at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the face of nearly insurmountable odds, Nell finds strength in lasting friendships and in the rich inner life

Widowed ProtagonistSingle Parent ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Nora Webster

Colm Toibin · 373 pages

"Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be drawn back into it. Wounded, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young

Widowed ProtagonistSingle Parent ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Jump-Off Creek

Molly Gloss · 186 pages

Lydia Sanderson writes about her life on Jump Off Creek in the higher mountain country of Oregon in 1895. She tells of friendship, loss, daily struggles, and achievements.

Widowed ProtagonistRural FarmCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

Robert C. O'Brien · 240 pages

Some extraordinary rats come to the aid of a mouse family in this Newbery Medal Award-winning classic by notable children's author Robert C. O'Brien. Mrs. Frisby, a widowed mouse with four small children, is faced with a terrible problem. She must move her family to their summer quarters immediately, or face almost certain death. But her youngest son, Timothy, lies ill with pneumonia and must not

Widowed ProtagonistRural FarmSingle Parent ProtagonistClassics
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The Four Winds

Kristin Hannah · 472 pages

Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is

Single Parent ProtagonistRural FarmCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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East of Eden

John Steinbeck · 602 pages

Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be his masterpiece. In his journal, Journal of a Novel (often read as a companion to the novel) he notes that “this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write.” Set primarily in the Salinas Valley in the early twentieth century, the novel traces three generations of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – as they grapp

Father and SonCharacter-DrivenRural FarmClassics
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Letters of a Woman Homesteader

Elinore Pruitt Stewart · 281 pages

The book is comprised of a series of letters written by a young widow from Denver to her friend and former employer about the experience of homesteading in rural Wyoming in the early 20th century. She describes the people who inhabited this harsh landscape with empathy and humor, including migrants from the US and abroad, orphans, newlyweds and hermits. These people were settling the frontier at

Single Parent ProtagonistWidowed ProtagonistRural FarmClassics
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The Power of the Dog

Thomas Savage · 283 pages

First published in 1967, Thomas Savage's western novel about two brothers and the competition between them when one marries now includes an afterword by Annie Proulx.

Rural FarmCharacter-DrivenWidowed ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
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The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Widowed ProtagonistSingle Parent ProtagonistFather and SonCharacter-Driven
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Morning Glory

LaVyrle Spencer · 437 pages

LOVE IN A STRANGER'S EYES... ELLY In town, they called her "Crazy Widow Dinsmore." But Elly was no stranger to their ridicule--she had been an outsider all her life, growing up in a boarded-up old house under the strict eye of her eccentric grandparents. Now she was all alone, with two little boys to raise, and a third child on the way. WILL He drifted into Whitney, Georgia, one lazy a

Single Parent ProtagonistWidowed ProtagonistRural FarmHistorical Fiction
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Sunset Song

Lewis Grassic Gibbon · 216 pages

Rural FarmFather and SonClassicsLiterary Fiction
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Chokher Bali

Rabindranath Tagore, Radha Chakravarty · 298 pages

Widowed ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenClassicsLiterary Fiction
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A Virtuous Woman

Kaye Gibbons · 176 pages

Widowed ProtagonistRural FarmCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Lamb in His Bosom

Caroline Miller · 358 pages

Rural FarmCharacter-DrivenHistorical FictionClassics
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O Pioneers!

Willa Cather · 140 pages

"Alexandra, daughter of a Swedish immigrant farmer in Nebraska, inherits the family farm and finds love with an old friend." "The heroic battle for survival of simple pioneer folk in the Nebraska country of the 1880s. John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her

Rural FarmCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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Father and SonCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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Prodigal Summer

Barbara Kingsolver · 444 pages

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a young hunter who invades her

Widowed ProtagonistRural FarmCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Within My Heart

Tamera Alexander · 494 pages

Widowed ProtagonistSingle Parent ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy · 457 pages

An intimate portrait of a woman, one of literature's most admirable and tragic heroines...Tess Durbeyfield knows what it is to work hard and expect little. But her life is about to veer from the path trod by her mother and grandmother. When her ne'er-do-well father learns that his family is the last of a long noble line, the d'Urbervilles, he sends Tess on a journey to meet her supposed kin—a jour

Rural FarmCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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Nathan Coulter: A Novel

Wendell Berry · 180 pages

This, the first title in the Port William series, introduces the rural section of Kentucky with which novelist Wendell Berry has had a lifelong fascination. When young Nathan loses his grandfather, Berry guides readers through the process of Nathan's grief, endearing the reader to the simple humanity through which Nathan views the world. Echoing Berry's own strongly held beliefs, Nathan tells us t

Rural FarmFather and SonCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Other Side of the Bridge

Mary Lawson · 296 pages

Rural FarmFather and SonCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Lost Husband

Katherine Center · 358 pages

Crazy Aunt Jean has offered Libby an escape from her hypercritical mother--a job and a place to live on her farm in the Texas Hill Country. Life on Aunt Jean's goat farm is both more wonderful and more mysterious than Libby could have imagined.

Widowed ProtagonistRural FarmSingle Parent ProtagonistFemale Lead

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