Lamb in His Bosom

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner · 250 pages

Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.

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.

Necessary Lies

Diane Chamberlain · 370 pages

Caring for her family on their mid-20th-century tobacco farm after the loss of her parents, 15-year-old Ivy connects with Grace County social worker Jane, who strains her personal and professional relationships with her advocacy of Ivy's family, whose dark secrets test Jane's resolve against racial tensions and state-mandated sterilizations.

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

River of Earth

James Still · 245 pages

The story of a poor family in Appalachia, pulled between the despair of their meager farm and the promise offered by the mining camp, as seen through the eyes of a small boy.

Miss Jane

Brad Watson · 284 pages

"Astonishing prose brings to life a forgotten woman and a lost world in a strange and bittersweet Southern pastoral. Since his award-winning debut collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog- Men, Brad Watson has been expanding the literary traditions of the South, in work as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America. Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, he explores the

Feather Crowns

Bobbie Ann Mason · 464 pages

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

The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

Ann Weisgarber

Delta wedding

Eudora Welty · 247 pages

Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell · 864 pages

Margaret Mitchell's monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written: more than 28 million copies of the book have been sold in more than 37 countries. Today, more than 60 years after its initial publication, its ac

Where the Lilies Bloom

Vera Cleaver, Bill Cleaver · 175 pages

In the Great Smoky Mountains region, a fourteen-year-old girl struggles to keep her family together after their father dies.

So Big

Edna Ferber · 283 pages

So Big - winner of the Pulitzer Prize - the unforgettable story of Selina Peake Dejong, her marriage, widowhood, eventual success as a truck farmer, and of her son, Dirk. In So Big, Ferber simultaneously created a vivid picture of turn-of-the-century Chicago and dealt with the contemporary issues of poverty, Americanization, family tensions, sexism, and success.

The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

Rhonda Riley · 424 pages

During World War II, teenager Evelyn Roe is sent to manage the family farm in rural North Carolina, where she finds what she takes to be a badly burned soldier on their property. She rescues him, and it quickly becomes clear he is not a man...and not one of us. The rescued body recovers at an unnatural speed, and just as fast, Evelyn and Adam fall deeply in love. The author reveals the exhilaratin

Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee · 288 pages

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch -- "Scout" -- returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memori

A Lesson Before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines · 256 pages

In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white

Caddie Woodlawn

Carol Ryrie Brink · 270 pages

Caddie Woodlawn is a children's historical fiction novel by Carol Ryrie Brink which received the Newbery Medal in 1936 and a Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958. The original 1935 edition was illustrated by Newbery-award-winning author and illustrator Kate Seredy. Macmillan released a later edition in 1973, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.

Over the Plain Houses

Julia Franks · 271 pages

A Depression-era Appalachian farm wife is branded as a witch by her fundamentalist husband when she bonds with a USDA agent who has traveled to the North Carolina mountains to instruct regional families on how to modernize their homes and farms.

The Trees

Conrad Richter · 302 pages

Sayward, the oldest daughter in the Luckett family, becomes determined that the family will survive in the wilderness of Ohio.

All the Living

C.E. Morgan · 199 pages

Aloma is a young woman who has put her life aside - and her dreams of becoming a pianist - to move in with her lover, Orren. His family has recently been killed in an accident. Stricken with grief and overwhelmingly burdened by the shape his life has taken, Orren is desperate to keep the tobacco farm running. There is a drought, and he needs it to rain. As he toils with the land, Aloma finds that

All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages

The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Mildred D. Taylor · 276 pages

Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, it is the story of one family's struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence. It is a story of physical survival, but more important, it is a story of the survival of the human spirit. And, too, it is Cassie's story -- Cassie Logan, an independent girl raised by a family for whom independence is primary, a family determined not t

A Virtuous Woman

Kaye Gibbons · 176 pages

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