The Distance from the Heart of Things


Ashley Warlick - 1996
    Coming home from college to her grandfather's prosperous Carolina vineyard, Mavis takes the measure of the emotional distance she has traveled from the people closest to her heart: her dreamy mother, her practical aunt, her bewildered boyfriend, her prodigal uncle - and most of all Punk, her grandfather, who plans to make Mavis his sole heir. Told with warmth, wit, and brio, Warlick's first novel rejoices in womanhood and the strength of loving ties. As New York Newsday said of Warlick, "Her literary talents, not to mention her prospects, are immense."

A Fragile Peace


Teresa Crane - 1984
    But before the day is out that peace is shattered due to a war being fought in a country not their own.Summer 1940: London is at war, and for the first time in the history of combat a civilian population is under attack from the air. As a consequence - also for the first time - a generation of young men is called upon to face the enemy not from within an organised force on land or on sea but in individual and lethal combat in the skies above the green, fertile and until now peaceful fields of southern England… The war was not of their making but the Jordan family will do whatever it takes to save all that they hold dear. The perfect family saga of love, war and hope for fans of Josephine Cox, Lily Graham and Natasha Lester.

Edisto Revisited


Padgett Powell - 1996
    Not yet ready to fully embrace adulthood, Simons finds himself surrendering to cynicism, as well as to the temptations of his “turned-out-well” first cousin, Patricia.To avoid sinking further into his rut, Simons embarks on a road trip through the South. After a disastrous stint as a Corpus Christi fisherman, he exits the Lone Star State, doubling back to the Louisiana bayou to spend some quality time with his former friend and mentor—and his mother’s ex-lover—Taurus. But as even Taurus’s once sought-after wisdom wears thin, Simons begins to suspect that the grass is not greener on the other side—it may be burnt, brown, and dead wherever he goes.

Noble Norfleet


Reynolds Price - 2002
     A few days before Noble Norfleet's eighteenth birthday, his family suffers a violent catastrophe. The sole survivor, Noble throws himself into a reckless affair with his Spanish teacher, whose husband is fighting in Vietnam. When Noble graduates, he enlists as well and, while serving as an army medic, experiences a mysterious vision that seems tied to uncanny events in his recent past. Not until thirty years later -- after a life short on friends and troubled by a compulsion to worship women's bodies -- is Noble challenged to rethink the decades-old mystery of his family tragedy. Faced with an ominous choice, Noble finally comes to accept an enormous duty he's long tried to ignore. Soon, perhaps for the first time, his future seems hopeful.

Sleeping Beauties


Susanna Moore - 1993
    Or so they prove for Clio, who marries a well-known Hollywood actor--providing her with the promise of escape from the entanglements of island life.

Almost Innocent


Sheila Bosworth - 1984
    Like the old master Henry James, Sheila Bosworth uses the chilling device of using the mirror of innocence to reflect evil. It is a lovely achievement, a superior one."-Walker Percy Clay-Lee Calvert is the love child of two people who are as beautiful as models in a magazine but whose similarity ends there. Her father, Rand, is an artist-easygoing, dreamy, principled, and chronically jobless. Her mother, Constance, is the blue-blooded, pampered, delicate but determined daughter of a state supreme court justice. How their intense passion for each other plays out against the sumptuousness and decay of 1950s New Orleans is something to which no innocent should be privy. In Sheila Bosworth's mesmerizing first novel, the era, the place, the people, of Clay-Lee's childhood all form an air as real as our own pasts, alternately dim and indelible, where everyone bears some guilt, and all are almost innocent.

The Great Divorce


Valerie Martin - 1994
    From the Orange Prize-winning author of PROPERTY, with a tale of sex, betrayal and the wilder side of human nature.

The Land of Women


Regina McBride - 2003
     She tries to remember her mother's voice and the pitch and treble of it passes through her; the rhythm of it so clear that for a moment they are...connected by frail strings. So begins The Land of Women, and we are swept into Fiona O'Faolain's last summer in Ireland, the season of her burgeoning sexuality. It is a time, too, when mother and daughter step toward friendship among the voluminous gowns they make for local brides. Yet that giddy summer also delivers betrayal. Fiona's journey from the shame that ended her girlhood takes her to Santa Fe and to Carlos Aragon, a restorer of antiquities, whose ancestry is mysteriously linked to hers. As he explores their pasts with the precision of an artisan, Fiona must face her excruciating memory. In The Land of Women the past lives in the present, and physical and emotional geography touch.

Keeper of the House


Rebecca T. Godwin - 1994
    In 1929, due to mysterious family circumstances, Minyon is given up by her grandmother to the employment of Ariadne Fleming, a white madam in the famously elegant brothel called Hazelhedge. At the age of fourteen, she becomes a pair of eyes and hands, watching and working almost invisibly in a world where men and women leave their inhibition, and their pasts, at the door. As Minyon grows up in the household with other black people who provide behind-the-scenes support of Hazelhedge, she cannot escape her haunting childhood memories. Even while bearing witness to the events unfolding around her, Minyon seeks to find her place in the world, and her pace within herself.

Porky


Deborah Moggach - 1983
    But she felt no different – not until she realised she was losing her innocence in a way that none of her friends could possibly imagine. Only a child robbed of her childhood can know too late what it means to be loved too little and loved too much…

Between, Georgia


Joshilyn Jackson - 2006
    She's got two mothers, "one deaf-blind and the other four baby steps from flat crazy." She's got two men: a husband who's easing out the back door; and a best friend, who's laying siege to her heart in her front yard. And she has two families: the Fretts, who stole her and raised her right; and the Crabtrees, who won't forget how they were done wrong. Now, in Between, Georgia, a feud that began the night Nonny was born is escalating and threatening to expose family secrets.Ironically, it might be just what the town needs... if only Nonny weren't stuck in between.

Shoot the Moon


Billie Letts - 2004
    In 1972, windswept DeClare, Oklahoma, was consumed by the murder of a young mother, Gaylene Harjo, and the disappearance of her baby, Nicky Jack. When the child's pajama bottoms were discovered on the banks of Willow Creek, everyone feared that he, too, had been killed, although his body was never found.Nearly thirty years later, Nicky Jack mysteriously returns to DeClare, shocking the town and stirring up long-buried memories. But what he discovers about the night he vanished is more astonishing than he or anyone could have imagine. Piece by piece, what emerges is a story of dashed hopes, desperate love, and a secret that still cries out for justice...and redemption.

When Crickets Cry


Charles Martin - 2006
    A child with a doubtful future. And a shared journey toward healing for both their hearts.It begins on the shaded town square in a sleepy Southern town. A spirited seven-year-old has a brisk business at her lemonade stand. But the little girl's pretty yellow dress can't quite hide the ugly scar on her chest.Her latest customer, a bearded stranger, drains his cup and heads to his car, his mind on a boat he's restoring at a nearby lake. The stranger understands more about the scar than he wants to admit. And the beat-up bread truck careening around the corner with its radio blaring is about to change the trajectory of both their lives.Before it's over, they'll both know there are painful reasons why crickets cry . . . and that miracles lurk around unexpected corners.

Candelo


Georgia Blain - 1999
    Choices were made without thinking. Young lives came together and would never be the same again. Years on, as Ursula confronts decisions that are not so easy to make, revelations collide with memories of Candelo - and some breathtaking secrets come to light.

Winslow in Love


Kevin Canty - 2005
    His marriage is over and he is alone, teaching poetry as a visiting professor in Montana and continuing to avoid actually writing himself. He drinks to oblivion every night.At this freezing college, in the dead of winter, Winslow meets Erika, one of his poetry students. What begins with office hours and Jim Beam in paper cups becomes a road trip as they travel through Utah and Arizona. Long haunted by thoughts of death, both Erika and Winslow begin to glimpse the power life can hold if they will only open up to the shame, beauty, and heartbreak of it all.