In the slum known as the Ape Yard, hope's last refuge is a boardinghouse where a handful of residents dream of a better life. Earl Whitaker, who is white, and Tio Grant, who is black, are both teenagers, both orphans, and best friends. In the same house live two of the most important adults in the boys' lives: Em Jojohn, the gigantic Lumbee Indian handyman, is notorious for his binges, his rat-catching prowess, and his mysterious departures from town. Jayell Crooms, a gifted but rebellious architect, is stuck in a loveless marriage to a conventional woman intent on climbing the social ladder.Crooms's vision of a new Ape Yard, rebuilt by its own residents, unites the four-and puts them on a collision course with Doc Bobo, a smalltown Machiavelli who rules the community like a feudal lord. Jeff Fields's exuberantly defined characters and his firmly rooted sense of place have earned A Cry of Angels an intensely loyal following. Its republication, more than three decades since it first appeared, is cause for celebration.

    It is an epic account of a generation--America in the 1940s.

    By the end of summer, the narrator writes, "two of us were going to suffer like we never had before."

    The classic novel of 1950s New York by the author of Clockers and Samaritan

    unwillingly accepts a summer babysitting job on Nantucket Island and finds it far more pleasurable than she expected, even though she must cope with her employer's mental problems and a ghostly visitor.

    For young Ra to make all the tools needed by his Stone Age tribe is a new idea for all of them, and provides Ra with a skill that saves his life when he is abandoned by his tribe for forgetting how to hunt.

    Her elder sister Ruth, caught up in a world of parties, fashions and boyfriends, ignores her. And her brother Simon, to whom she is devoted, goes to London to study music. Listless and unhappy, Anna takes no pleasure in her family's new home, or in her surroundings. The Wyndcliffe, "a brooding ancient face of sheer stone, dour and grey," matches her mood. Then she encounters John Hollis, a young sympathetic poet. But he died in 1823......"