Book picks similar to
Prisons by Mary Lee Settle


historical-fiction
fiction
appalachia
lit-fiction

On the Night Plain


J. Robert Lennon - 2001
    His father has mysteriously disappeared, and Grant’s brother, Max, a lifelong rival, takes off on the day Grant returns, leaving him with a sickly flock and a pile of debt. When Max returns a year later with a young woman named Sophia, a contest of will begins between the brothers, reviving ghosts that Grant had hoped were banished from the homestead.

Hiroshima Joe


Martin Booth - 1985
    Now a shell of a man, he lives in a cheap Hong Kong hotel, scrounging for food and the occasional bar girl. The locals call him "Hiroshima Joe" with a mixture of pity and contempt. But Joe—haunted by the sounds and voices of his past, debilitated by illness, and shattered by his wartime ordeal—is a man whose compassion and will to survive define a clear-eyed and unexpected heroism. One of the most powerful novels about the experience of war, first published in 1985.

Succession


Steven Veerapen - 2020
    She has yet to nominate an heir.The crown looks set to fall to James of Scotland.But it is far from inevitable.Gowrie, a sinister Scottish traitor, has arrived in England. On him is a document containing a shocking secret that will compromise King James.Languishing in prison, artful thief Ned Savage is freed by his patron, the queen’s principal secretary, Sir Robert Cecil. His mission is to find the document before it can be made public. If he succeeds, his life will be spared.But he is not alone in seeking Gowrie.On his trail are a ruthless gang of conspirators. The Red Cross Plot aims to prevent any foreigner from taking the English throne. And the Knights of the Red Cross will kill to secure the document.In a journey that will take him from London to Derbyshire and Scotland, Savage must foil the Red Cross Plot, protect King James’s darkest secret, and keep himself safe from execution.And he must do it all before the curtain falls on Elizabeth’s reign.

East Bay Grease


Eric Miles Williamson - 1999
    While his mother runs with Hell's Angel's bikers, T-Bird falls beneath the men's fists and favors, finds solace and hope in the slightest of rewards, and seeks to survive. Soon, his ex-con father returns to town, and what follows is a raw, powerful, poetic story of one boy's passage into adulthood.

The Legend of Mammy Jane


Sibyl Jarvis Pischke - 1981
    

The Long Night Of Francisco Sanctis


Humberto Costantini - 1984
    (Nancy Pearl)

Lost Geography


Charlotte Bacon - 2000
    "Lost Geography" takes the complexity of migration as its central subject: Why do landscape, work, and family lock some people in place and release others? In settings both rural and urban, these stalwart, tragically dispersed yet resilient people respond not only to new environments and experiences but to the eruption of sudden loss and change.As the settings and characters shift in this wise, resonant book, readers are invited to see how habits of survival translate from one generation to another. How are we like our forebears? How does circumstance make us alter what our heritage has told us is important? With unfailing subtlety and elegance, "Lost Geography" teaches us, in a luminous sequence of intense personal dramas, that what keeps us alive isn't so much our ability to understand the details of our past as having the luck and courage to survive the assaults of both the present and history.

Dawn Of The Century


Robert Vaughan - 1992
    In a time of robber-baron industrialists and rapid territorial expansion both at home and abroad, the new music called “ragtime” is the soundtrack for a confident nation of ambitious dreamers. It is 1904 and the nation’s eyes are on the St. Louis World's Fair, which features an astounding variety of modern marvels. The enormous exhibition brings together the best minds the country has to offer, each of them with something to lose and opportunities to seize: Bob Canfield, a young and wealthy landowner who is willing to risk his honor and his fortune to make a profit out of the desert; Eric Twainbough, a solitary young cowboy riding the rails East from Wyoming, innocently bringing disaster with him; Terry Perkins, a reporter desperate to get the scoop on the story in St. Louis; Connie Bateman, one of the politically conscious new women fighting for freedom, bravely defending their right to equality.

The Lucky Gourd Shop


Joanna Catherine Scott - 2000
    A much-anticipated letter from Korea fails to satisfy them but sparks memories in the eldest. So begins the heartbreaking and inspiring tale of their birth mother's life as their adoptive mother imagines it. Abandoned as a baby and then again and again, Mi Sook is raised in a Korean coffee shop by its string of owner-mothers. She grows to adulthood fiercely independent and eventually comes to manage the shop. But her marriage to Kun Soo, with whom she has three children, begins a series of events that ultimately wrench her babies from her arms. Deceived by Kun Soo and his well-intentioned mother, and unsupported by a rigidly Confucian culture, Mi Sook emerges as a tragic and heroic figure who embodies the rich complexities of a nation -- and of the heart.

The Duke of York


Patricia Finney - 2014
    Four physicians have failed to bring the young lad back to health, and his nurses seem unable to bring him comfort. Sir Robert decides that he and Elizabeth Lady Carey should have the keeping of the child – despite the disgrace that will come to them if he dies in their care. It’s not long before Sir Robert begins to suspect that foul play lies behind the young Duke’s condition. Is there a poisoner at Court? If so, will Sir Robert find the miscreant in time to save the Duke? Patricia Finney is the author of six novels featuring Sir Robert Carey, all of them written under the pseudonym P F Chisholm and all available on Kindle. Patricia Finney’s latest Elizabethan crime novel, Do We Not Bleed?, features the ambiguous James Enys, his elusive sister, and a young playwright, Will Shakespeare. Do We Not Bleed? is also available on Kindle.

Swimming Across the Hudson


Joshua Henkin - 1997
    What if he hadn't been adopted by Jews, what if his brother, Jonathan, had been adopted by a different couple? He and Jonathan fantasize about being the secret sons of Sandy Koufax, of coming to earth in a spaceship. They make blood pacts and switch names. But while they imagine other identities, they search for ways to feel that they belong to each other, to their parents, to their home. As adolescents, even in the familiar and happy comfort of the Manhattan apartment where they live, their dreams of girls and rock stars are colored by these concerns. Now Ben Suskind is thirty years old, living in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Jenny, and her daughter. He still reflects on the questions of his youth; Jenny often has to pull his head out of the clouds. So when he receives a letter from a woman claiming to be his birth mother, he is unprepared, panicked, but curious. He tells his adoptive parents about the letter, and they fly him home to New York and reveal a secret about his past, one that turns Ben's whole world upside down. Without telling anyone, Ben embarks on a journey, risking his relationship with everyone - his girlfriend, his brother, his parents. He combs through the records of his family's past, trying to find the facts about who he and Jonathan really are, and in the process learns the price of the lies people tell in the name of truth and good intentions.

Swimming in the Congo


Margaret Meyers - 1995
    

I Want to Buy a Vowel


John Welter - 1996
    In this terminally irreverent (Richmond News-Leader) novel, he finds himself taking on everyone from his editor and his girlfriend to the fundamentalists and vegetarians covered on his beat -- and along the way, learns some surprising (and hilarious) lessons about life, love, and the press.

Earth & Heaven


Sue Gee - 2001
    has dared to take on a difficult, grief-stricken period of English history, and done so with sensitivity and understanding; EARTH AND HEAVEN is the clever, compelling result' The Times

The True Account: A Novel of the Lewis Clark Kinneson Expeditions


Howard Frank Mosher - 2003
    Along the way True and Ti encounter Daniel Boone and his six-foot-two spinster daughter, Flame Danielle; fight and trick a renegade army out to stop Lewis’s expedition; invent baseball with the Nez Perce; hold a high-stakes rodeo with Sacagawea’s Shoshone relatives; and outwit True’s lifelong adversary, the Gentleman from Vermont, a.k.a. the devil himself.