Wind from an Enemy Sky


D'Arcy McNickle - 1978
    Through the eyes of Antoine, grandson of the tribal leader, we see the tribe attempt to overcome their demoralization at the hands of advancing white civilization.The Indians respond to the building of a dam by trying to gain the return of a sacred medicine bundle. McNickle's ability to depict psychologically complex characters of both races, such as Bull, the aging leader of the Little Elk, and Rafferty, the Indian Agency Superintendent, results in a convincing story and leads the reader to hope that tragedy can be averted. At the same time, McNickle provides a sensitive portrait of the religious depth and human warmth of Indian culture. But although whites and Indians grow in their understanding of one another, the mistakes of the past compound to bring about the violent final confrontation, envisioned in the dreams of the mysterious Two Sleeps.

Thrush Green


Miss Read - 1959
    This volume introduces Thrush Green, the neighboring village to Fairacre: its blackthorn bushes, thatch-roofed cottages, enchanting landscape, and jumble sales. Readers will delight in a new cast of characters and also welcome familiar faces as they become immersed in the village's turn of events on one pivotal day -- May Day. Before the day is over, life and love and perhaps eternity will touch the immemorial peace of the village.

Souls Raised from the Dead


Doris Betts - 1994
    Mary Grace Thompson is about to turn thirteen, horse-crazy, doted upon by two sets of feuding grandparents - the respectable Thompsons and the trashy Broomes. She lives with her divorced father, Frank, a North Carolina state trooper. It's three years since her mother ran away with the county tax collector - and she hasn't come back, even for a visit. Frank dates, but the center of his universe is his daughter. On the verge of puberty, Mary is just beginning to try her wings - wangling her way into riding lessons, pushing her father toward the beautiful riding instructor, dreaming of boys. She's precariously aware that if she wants she can join the crowd whose grades and looks will take them someplace. Every day on the job, Frank brings calm to other people's catastrophes - from an overturned poultry truck spewing panicked chickens over the highway to fatal accidents. Suddenly, the catastrophe that he feels has been circling his own world since his wife took off comes home to stay. Suddenly, Mary Grace is diagnosed with an incurable disease. Armed with courage, humor, and a shaky faith in God, Frank, the family, and their friends face this most devastating of events - the slow death of a beloved child. The vivid and various responses - of Mary Grace herself, of her wisecracking granddad, of her no-account mother, of her adoring father, as well as his two girlfriends and his fellow state troopers - are told with an immediacy that floods this novel with a rush of life. With profound feeling, with a humor both delicate and robust,Doris Betts gives us a family richly varied and real. Souls Raised from the Dead is her finest novel yet.

Above the Thunder


Renée Manfredi - 2003
    A preternaturally intelligent little girl who eavesdrops on the dead. A charming, sybaritic gay man torn between his love for his partner and the anarchy of his desires.These are the charged poles of Renee Manfredi’s gorgeously written first novel, a book that explores the currents of tenderness, responsibility and chance that turn strangers into a family. Anna Brinkman meets her ten-year-old granddaughter Flynn when the girl appears on her doorstep, desperate for a love more steadfast than any she has received from her parents. She meets Jack when he shows up in an AIDS support group she is running and does his best to get kicked out. What ensues in a house on the coast of Maine will be the great journey of all their lives. Filled with humor, sadness, and wisdom, Above the Thunder is a magical achievement.

Burntcoat


Sarah Hall - 2021
    Before we all closed our doors...In an unnamed British city, the virus is spreading, and like everyone else, the celebrated sculptor Edith Harkness retreats inside. She isolates herself in her immense studio, Burntcoat, with Halit, the lover she barely knows. As life outside changes irreparably, inside Burntcoat Edith and Halit find themselves changed as well: by the histories and responsibilities each carries and bears, by the fears and dangers of the world outside, and by the progressions of their new relationship. And Burntcoat will be transformed too, into a new and feverish world, a place in which Edith comes to an understanding of how we survive the impossible--and what is left after we have.A sharp and stunning novel of art and ambition, mortality and connection, Burntcoat is a major work from "one of our most influential short story writers" (Guardian). It is an intimate and vital examination of how and why we create--make art, form relationships, build a life--and an urgent exploration of an unprecedented crisis, the repercussions of which are still years in the learning.

Crusoe's Daughter


Jane Gardam - 1985
    And there she stayed for eighty-one years while the century raged around her, while lamplight and Victorian order became chaos and nuclear dread. Crusoe's Daughter, ambitious, moving and wholly original, is her story.

White Bird in a Blizzard


Laura Kasischke - 1999
    But in dreams that become too real to ignore, she's haunted by her mother's cries for help.Finally, she must act on her instinct that something violent and evil has occurred - a realization that brings Kat to a chilling discovery.

Resistance


Owen Sheers - 2007
    A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege.1944. After the fall of Russia and the failed D-Day landings, a German counterattack lands on British soil. Within a month, half of Britain is occupied. The seat of British government has fled to Worcester, Churchill to Canada. A network of British resistance cells is all that is left to defy the German army.Against this backdrop, Resistance opens with Sarah Lewis, a twenty-six-year-old farmer's wife, waking to find her husband, Tom, has disappeared. She is not alone, as all the other women in the Welsh border valley of Olchon wake to find their husbands gone. With this sudden and unexplained absence, the women regroup as an isolated, all-female community and wait, hoping for news.Later, a German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery. When a severe winter forces the two groups together, a fragile mutual dependency develops. Sarah begins a faltering acquaintance with the patrol’s commanding officer, Albrecht Wolfram, and it is to her that he reveals the purpose of the patrol. But as the pressure of the war beyond presses in on this isolated community, this fragile state of harmony is increasingly threatened. Imbued with immense imaginative breadth and confidence, Owen Sheers's debut novel unfolds with the pace and intensity of a thriller. A hymn to the glorious landscape of the Welsh border territories and a portrait of a community under siege, Resistance is a first novel of grace and power.

The Children's Hospital


Chris Adrian - 2006
    Inside, assailed by mysterious forces, doctors and patients are left to remember the world they've lost and to imagine one to come. At the center, Jemma Claflin, a medical student, finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny. Simultaneously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly relevant, The Children's Hospital is a work of stunning scope, mesmerizing detail, and wrenching emotion.

Little America


Henry Bromell - 2001
    In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, CIA agent Mack Hooper arrived in the tiny middle-eastern kingdom of Kurash with a mission to befriend and protect its inexperienced young ruler. Now, forty years later, the country no longer exists and Mack’s son Terry is trying to piece together his father’s story. Was he a friend to the young king, or a diplomat-seducer sent to betray him? And what happened to the lost kingdom? Moving deftly between the feudal world of Kurash and the martini-washed enclaves of the American spies, Little America is a riveting and unexpectedly moving tale of honor and betrayal as well as a brilliant evocation of espionage in the darkest days of the Cold War.

The Big Sky


A.B. Guthrie Jr. - 1947
    B. Guthrie Jr.'s epic adventure novels set in the American West. Here he introduces Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers: traveling the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rockies, these frontiersmen live as trappers, traders, guides, and explorers. The story centers on Caudill, a young Kentuckian driven by a raging hunger for life and a longing for the blue sky and brown earth of big, wild places. Caught up in the freedom and savagery of the wilderness, Caudill becomes an untamed mountain man, whom only the beautiful daughter of a Blackfoot chief dares to love.

Giant


Edna Ferber - 1952
    But for Leslie, falling in love with a Texan was a lot simpler than falling in love with Texas. Upon their arrival at Bick's ranch, Leslie is confronted not only with the oppressive heat and vastness of Texas but also by the disturbing inequity between runaway riches and the poverty and racism suffered by the Mexican workers on the ranch. Leslie and Bick's loving union endures against all odds, but a reckoning is coming and a price will have to be paid.A sensational and enthralling saga, Ferber masterfully captures the essence of Texas with all its wealth and excess, cruelty and prejudice, pride and violence.

The River Swimmer: Novellas


Jim Harrison - 2013
    In The Land of Unlikeness, Clive, a failed artist, divorced and grappling with aging, returns to his Michigan family's farmhouse to spell his sister's caregiving of their mother for a month. The return to familiar ground provides a groundswell of upheaval in Clive's 20-years long life patterns. In The River Swimmer, Thad, an Upper Peninsula island farm boy struggles to cope with life out of the water, and coming of age on dry land. The River Swimmer is a porrait of two striking and richly drawn characters, written with Harrison's wit, and revelatory insight into the human condition.

Antic Hay


Aldous Huxley - 1923
    This is Huxley at his biting, brilliant best: a novel, loud with derisive laughter, which satirically scoffs at all conventional morality and at stuffy people everywhere, a novel that's always charged with excitement.

In the Tennessee Country


Peter Taylor - 1994
    The memory of this journey will haunt him for the rest of his life. On this trip, he meets the enigmatic Cousin Aubrey, a man of "irregular kinship," the black sheep of the Longfort clan. As the years pass, and Aubrey disappears into the world, Nathan begins to compulsively collect rumors about his faraway life—as Nathan's mother's first true love, a charmer of European society, a Don Juan, a worldly success—and sees it in stinging contrast to his own unfulfilled dreams of becoming an artist. Much later in life, the two men—now old—will meet again.