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The Diary of Mattie Spenser: A Novel

Sandra Dallas · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

Nancy E. Turner · 400 pages

A moving, exciting, and heartfelt American saga inspired by the author's own family memoirs, these words belong to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon—from child to determined young adult to loving mother—she shares the turbulent events, both jo

Diary FormatRural FarmMarriage in TroubleCharacter-Driven
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I Will Send Rain

Rae Meadows · 272 pages

"Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934 and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma is struggling as the earliest storms of The Dust Bowl descend. All around them the wheat harvests are drying out and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Gre

Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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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.

Rural FarmDiary FormatAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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The Snow Child

Eowyn Ivey · 389 pages

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season's first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-hai

Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleAtmosphericHistorical Fiction
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The Seamstress

Frances de Pontes Peebles · 646 pages

As seamstresses, the young sisters Emilia and Luzia dos Santos know how to cut, how to mend, and how to conceal. These are useful skills in the lawless backcountry of Brazil, where ruthless land barons called "colonels" feud with bands of outlaw cangaceiros, trapping innocent residents in the cross fire.Emilia, whose knowledge of the world comes from fashion magazines and romance novels, dreams of

Marriage in TroubleRural FarmAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

Diary FormatRural FarmHistorical FictionCharacter-Driven
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Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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The Colour

Rose Tremain · 382 pages

An epic of life in New Zealand during the nineteenth century explores the relationship between two newlyweds as they encounter the harsh realities of their chosen home in the South Pacific.

Marriage in TroubleRural FarmAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy · 416 pages

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening

Rural FarmAtmosphericMarriage in TroubleCharacter-Driven
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Velva Jean Learns to Drive

Jennifer Niven · 608 pages

Set in Appalachia in the years before World War II, Velva Jean Learns to Drive is a poignant story of a spirited young girl growing up in the gold-mining and moonshining South. Before she dies, Velva Jean’s mother urges her to “live out there in the great wide world.” Velva Jean dreams of becoming a big-time singer in Nashville until she falls in love with Harley Bright, a handsome juvenile delinq

Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleAtmosphericHistorical Fiction
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Broken Country

Clare Leslie Hall · 307 pages

*“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”* Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel W

Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleAtmosphericHistorical Fiction
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Gap Creek

Robert Morgan · 326 pages

"There is a most unusual woman living in Gap Creek. Julie Harmon works hard, "hard as a man" they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop."--BOOK JACKET. "People depend on her. They need her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. She is just a teenager when her little brother dies in her arms. That same year she marries Hank and moves down into the valley where fire and visions

Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleHistorical FictionAtmospheric
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The Last Great Dance on Earth

Sandra Gulland · 390 pages

*The Last Great Dance on Earth* is the triumphant final volume of Sandra Gulland's beloved trilogy based on the life of Josephine Bonaparte. When the novel opens, Josephine and Napoleon have been married for four tumultuous years. Napoleon is Josephine's great love, and she his. But their passionate union is troubled from within, as Josephine is unable to produce an heir, and from without, as Engl

Diary FormatMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Loving Frank

Nancy Horan · 380 pages

I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction

Marriage in TroubleRural FarmAtmosphericHistorical Fiction
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Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough · 573 pages

The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. Set primarily on Drogheda – a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback named after Drogheda, Ireland – the story focuses on the Cleary family and spans the years 1915 to 1969.

Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Euphoria

Lily King · 272 pages

"English anthropologist Andrew Banson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husban

AtmosphericMarriage in TroubleDiary FormatCharacter-Driven
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The Lost Garden

Helen Humphreys · 192 pages

It's Spring 1941 and London is being destroyed by the Blitz. Gwen Davis, a young horticulturist, leaves her beloved city for the Devon countryside where she encounters two people who will change her life forever: Raley, a Canadian officer awaiting posting to the front; and Jane, a frail but free spirit whose fiancé is missing in action.

Rural FarmAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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On the Calculation of Volume I

Solvej Balle · 176 pages

Diary FormatMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
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Half Broke Horses

Jeannette Walls · 313 pages

It is 1970 in a small town in California. "Bean" Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decay

Rural FarmCharacter-DrivenMarriage in TroubleHistorical Fiction
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Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver · 436 pages

Written by Barbara Kingsolver, the Orange Prize-winning author of The Lacuna and million-selling The Poisonwood Bible, and brought to you by FaberShop, Flight Behaviour is a novel about catastrophe and denial. On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the

Rural FarmMarriage in TroubleAtmosphericCharacter-Driven
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The Things We Cannot Say

Kelly Rimmer · 448 pages

Marriage in TroubleRural FarmCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-32

Joan W. Blos · 144 pages

The journal of a 14-year-old girl, kept the last year she lived on the family farm, records daily events in her small New Hampshire town, her father's remarriage, and the death of her best friend.

Diary FormatRural FarmHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Shadowed Land

Signe Pike · 400 pages

Marriage in TroubleAtmosphericCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction

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