The Unquiet Earth

The Well and the Mine

Gin Phillips · 256 pages

“When you close the book, you’ll miss these characters. But The Well and the Mine doesn’t just give you characters who’ll stay with you—it gives you a whole world.”—Fannie Flagg, author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man. A novel of warmth and true feeling, The Well and the Mine explores the value of community, charity, family, and hope that we can g

To The Bright And Shining Sun

James Lee Burke · 232 pages

Burke brings his brilliant feel for time and place to a stunning story of Appalachia in the early 1960s.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck · 553 pages

Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being f

A Walk on the Wild Side

Nelson Algren · 346 pages

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern

The Last Ballad

Wiley Cash · 400 pages

"The eagerly awaited next novel from the author of the New York Times bestselling A Land More Kind Than Home about a young mother desperately trying to hold her family together in the years before the Great Depression, a haunting and moving story of cowardice, courage and sacrifice"-- Ella May Wiggins, a young mother desperately trying to hold her family together with the paltry nine dollars a

Third Life Of Grange Copeland

Alice Walker · 302 pages

"Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third and final cha

The Handsome Road

Gwen Bristow · 326 pages

God's Bits of Wood

Ousmane Sembene · 333 pages

A Painted House

John Grisham · 465 pages

Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.

Germinal

Emile Zola · 496 pages

The thirteenth novel in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he disco

The Marauders

Tom Cooper · 304 pages

When the BP oil spill devastates the Gulf coast, those who made a living by shrimping find themselves in dire straits. For the oddballs and lowlifes who inhabit the sleepy, working class bayou town of Jeannette, these desperate circumstances serve as the catalyst that pushes them to enact whatever risky schemes they can dream up to reverse their fortunes. At the center of it all is Gus Lindquist,

Strumpet City

James Plunkett · 577 pages

Little Dorrit

Charles Dickens · 786 pages

Upon its publication in 1857, Little Dorrit immediately outsold any of Dickens's previous books. The story of William Dorrit, imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Prison, and his daughter and helpmate, Amy, or Little Dorrit, the novel charts the progress of the Dorrit family from poverty to riches. In his Introduction, David Gates argues that "intensity of imagination is the gift from which Dickens's

Mary Barton

Elizabeth Gaskell · 417 pages

Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner's son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the two men. Through Mary's dilemma, and the moving portrayal of he

Les Misérables

Victor Hugo · 747 pages

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

How Green Was My Valley

Richard Llewellyn · 495 pages

**This is a story set in a south Wales coal mining valley and tells of a family striving to improve their lives through hard work, education and their non-conformist faith.** The main character is the youngest son, Huw Morgan and his life's journey through the difficulties associated with the mining industry and the awful risks involved in deep coal mining in the **mid nineteenth century**. The

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.

Sea Glass

Anita Shreve · 368 pages

New bride Honoria sees her life change as the Great Depression strikes her small New England beach town.

The Stars Look Down

A.J. Cronin · 608 pages

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry · 713 pages

A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's eagerly awaited second novel and follows his critically acclaimed Such a Long Journey, the book that won three prestigious literary awards in 1991. Set in India in the mid-1970s, A Fine Balance is a richly textured novel which sweeps the reader up into its special world. Large in scope, the narrative focuses on four unlikely people who come together in a flat

Love on the Dole

Walter Greenwood · 256 pages

Out of This Furnace

Thomas Bell

Longbourn

Jo Baker · 331 pages

A novel whose principal characters are the servants in Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly real

The Tin Flute

Gabrielle Roy · 393 pages

A family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance while searching for love.