A shop owner defends herself against a sexual predator who is pushed to new boldness after he is disinvited to his family reunion. A closeted father facing a divorce that will leave his gifted boy adrift retrieves an astronaut’s remains. An engineer who dreams of orbiting earth joins a search for debris and instead uncovers an old neighbor’s buried longing. In a chorus of voices spanning places and years, What Luck, This Life explores the Columbia disaster’s surprising fallout for a town beset by the tensions of class, race, and missed opportunity. Evoking Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, the novel’s unforgettable characters struggle with family upheaval and mortality’s grip and a luminous book emerges—filled with heartache, beauty and warmth.

    But in the summer of 1989, when fifteen-year-old Lindy Simpson--free spirit, track star, and belle of the block--experiences a horrible crime late one evening near her home, it becomes apparent that this idyllic stretch of Southern suburbia has a dark side, too. In My Sunshine Away, M.O. Walsh brilliantly juxtaposes the enchantment of a charmed childhood with the gripping story of a violent crime, unraveling families, and consuming adolescent love. Acutely wise and deeply honest, it is an astonishing and page-turning debut about the meaning of family, the power of memory, and our ability to forgive.

    But when Katrina’s waters rise and the city’s broken levees cause devastating floods, Simon disappears.His son, Julian, a celebrated but down-on-his-luck trumpeter, rushes home to the city he left years before to search for a father with whom he’d been on difficult terms over preparing for the hurricane. Julian’s return to New Orleans brings him back in touch with figures from his past, loves and enemies both, and as his search for Simon takes him to the rural plot where Simon grew up, Julian is drawn deep into his troubles. As he comes to grips with his father’s likely fate and struggles to regain his trumpet chops, Julian slowly gains a deeper, richer understanding of both his father and their shared heritage.Wading Home is an important book about one of America’s most important cities, veiled in the form of a captivating page-turner. Lyrical, accessible, compelling, and populated by a broad, fully realized cast of supporting characters, its timeless story tells how this son strives to save his father. Shaken to the core by the devastation of a city, Julian discovers the true meanings of home, family, and history.

    After his family moves to Mississippi just before his junior year, Daniel finds fellow outsider Tim Cousins. The two become inseparable, sharing a fascination with ridicule, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, and Arnita Beecham, the most bewitching girl at Minor High. But soon things go terribly wrong. The friends commit a small crime that grows larger and larger, and threatens to engulf the whole town. Arnita, the first black prom queen in the history of the school, is injured and wakes up a different person. And Daniel, Tim, and their families are swept up in a shocking chain of events.

    O?Keeffe's four linked novellas span time and generations, and each brims with gorgeous, thoughtful prose and enduring characters. Love and secrets, unfulfilled dreams and missed opportunities, fear, greed, and compromised moral decisions all leave their mark here. A dairy farmer unknowingly falls in love with the younger sister of a woman he once cruelly jilted. A young man recalls his spinster aunt and the tragic story of her life's great love?a soldier who returned alive but altered by the Great War.A richly rewarding work that will resonate with fans of William Trevor and Alice Munro, "The Hill Road" heralds the arrival of an important new voice.

    His ex-wife is demanding more money. A woman he can’t even remember accuses him of fathering her child. Newspaper reporter Mitch Corsini shrugs and takes another drink. However, when his estranged teenaged daughter mysteriously disappears, his life finally has a purpose: find the child he's neglected for too long and rekindle the love they once shared. Mitch’s quest takes him to the Virginia mountains and his ancestral home. There, he finds himself locked in a life or death struggle to save his daughter as seventy-year-old family secrets and the fate of a long-forgotten railroad worker combine to shatter the very foundations of his world.

    The author of the classics River of Earth (1940) and The Wolfpen Poems (1986), Still is known for his careful prose construction and for the poetry of his meticulous, rhythmic style. Upon his death, however, one manuscript remained unpublished. Still's friends, family, and fellow writer Silas House will now deliver this story to readers, having assembled and refined the manuscript to prepare it for publication. Chinaberry, named for the ranch that serves as the centerpiece of the story, is Still's last and perhaps greatest contribution to American literature.Chinaberry follows the adventures of a young boy as he travels to Texas from Alabama in search of work on a cotton farm. Upon arriving, he discovers the ranch of Anson and Lurie Winters, a young couple whose lives are defined by hard work, family, and a tragedy that haunts their past. Still's entrancing narrative centers on the boy's experience at the ranch under Anson's watchful eye and Lurie's doting care, highlighting the importance of home, whether it is defined by people or a place.In this celebration of the art of storytelling, Still captures a time and place that are gone forever and introduces the reader to an unforgettable cast of characters, illustrating the impact that one person can have on another. A combination of memoir and imagination, truth and fiction, Chinaberry is a work of art that leaves the reader in awe of Still's mastery of language and thankful for the lifetime of wisdom that manifests itself in his work.

    But behind the white picket fences lies a web of secrets that reach from house to house.Up and down the streets, neighbors quietly bear the weight of their own pasts—until an accident at the community pool upsets the delicate equilibrium. And when tragic circumstances compel a woman to return to Sycamore Glen after years of self-imposed banishment, the tangle of the neighbors’ intertwined lives begins to unravel.During the course of a sweltering summer, long-buried secrets are revealed, and the neighbors learn that it’s impossible to really know those closest to us. But is it impossible to love and forgive them?

    Saul, however, is irrevocably drawn to Vine the moment he lays eye on her and believes they are meant to be married, over the objections of her mother and his. Despite her misgivings, Saul’s mother, Esme, and his brother Aaron take to Vine from the moment she comes to God’s Creek. In fact, Vine realizes from the start that Aaron’s interest in her is far more than brotherly. When Saul must leave Vine behind for a year of work, troubling and violent events follow his departure, and Vine’s spirit and her love are put to the ultimate test.This novel was the Winner of the Award for Special Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a Finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize.Blair brings this novel into a beautiful new paperback edition, along with two other Silas House novels, Clay’s Quilt and The Coal Tattoo. The three novels, which share a common setting and some characters, are companion novels. They may be read individually, in any order, but collectively, they form a rich tableau of life in rural mountain Kentucky in the last century.

    Afterwards, hisdaughter Eleanor discovers a will, in which he has left his entireestate to a woman she has never heard of before. Hiding it fromher siblings, she sets out to solve this mystery, and to unearth theconfronting truth about her reclusive father’s past.But Henry isn’t the only Hoffman with secrets. In the months thatfollow, his children learn things about each other they could neverpreviously have imagined.The Last Will and Testament of Henry Hoffman is a gripping andmany-layered story of love and loss, conflict and survival. Itexplores subjects that affect us all: guilt and redemption, theinescapability of the past, and how trauma resonates acrossgenerations.

    Set in a small town well below the Mason-Dixon line, River Jordan features an improbable friendship among three people who come to depend on one another like family. Jordan, a girl with an adventurous imagination, is hungry for warmth and companionship, since she gets no more than scolding from her strict mother and stepfather. When Jordan’s step-grandmother, Miss Amylee, needs a live-in nurse, the family’s housekeeper suggests her sister, Pansy—newly saved and released from prison—for the job. Pansy, Jordan, and Miss Amylee form an unlikely trio, and through small and large triumphs, each recovers a part of herself that was lost.

    Most people in Peckinpaw, Kentucky, assume that Ella's no-good husband did the deed. Others think Ella grew tired of his abuse and did it herself. Muddy is determined to find out for sure either way, especially once she finds strange papers hidden amongst her mama's possessions. But Peckinpaw keeps its secrets buried deep. Muddy's almost-more-than-friend, Bobby Marshall, knows that better than most. Though he passes for white, one of his ancestors was Frannie Crow, a slave hanged a century ago on nearby Hark Hill Plantation. Adorning the town square is a seat built from Frannie's gallows. A tribute, a relic--and a caution--it's known as Liar's Bench. Now, the answers Muddy seeks soon lead back to Hark Hill, to hatred and corruption that have echoed through the years--and lies she must be brave enough to confront at last. Kim Michele Richardson's lush, beautifully written debut is set against a Southern backdrop passing uneasily from bigotry and brutality to hope. With its compelling mystery and complex yet relatable heroine, Liar's Bench is a story of first love, raw courage, and truths that won't be denied.

    As uplifting and essential as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Gabrielle Donnelly’s novel will speak to anyone who’s ever fought with a sister, fallen in love with a fabulous pair of shoes, or wondered what on earth life had in store for her. With her older sister, Emma, planning a wedding and her younger sister, Sophie, preparing to launch a career on the London stage, Lulu can’t help but feel like the failure of the Atwater family. Lulu loves her sisters dearly and wants nothing but the best for them, but she finds herself stuck in a rut, working dead-end jobs with no romantic prospects in sight. When her mother asks her to find a cache of old family recipes in the attic of her childhood home, Lulu stumbles across a collection of letters written by her great-great-grandmother Josephine March. In her letters, Jo writes in detail about every aspect of her life: her older sister, Meg’s, new home and family; her younger sister Amy’s many admirers; Beth’s illness and the family’s shared grief over losing her too soon; and the butterflies she feels when she meets a handsome young German. As Lulu delves deeper into the lives and secrets of the March sisters, she finds solace and guidance, but can the words of her great-great-grandmother help Lulu find a place for herself in a world so different from the one Jo knew?Some things, of course, remain unchanged: the stories and jokes that form a family’s history, the laughter over tea in the afternoon, the desire to do the right thing in spite of obstacles. And above all, of course, the fierce, undying, and often infuriating bond of sisterhood that links the Atwater women every bit as firmly as it did the March sisters all those years ago. Both a loving tribute to Little Women and a wonderful contemporary family story, The Little Women Letters is a heartwarming, funny, and wise novel for today.

    On a late autumn day, near a little town called Franklin, 10,000 men will soon lie dead or dying in a battle that will change many lives for ever. None will be more changed than Carrie McGavock, who finds her home taken over by the Confederate army and turned into a field hospital. Taking charge, she finds the courage to face up to the horrors around her and, in doing so, finds a cause.Out on the battlefield, a tired young Southern soldier drops his guns and charges forward into Yankee territory, holding only the flag of his company's colours. He survives and is brought to the hospital. Carrie recognizes something in him - a willingness to die - and decides on that day, in her house, she will not let him.In the pain-filled days and weeks that follow, both find a form of mutual healing that neither thinks possible.In this extraordinary debut novel based on a true story, Robert Hicks has written an epic novel of love and heroism set against the madness of the American Civil War.

    She doesn't understand why her father leaves each night with a mysterious box or why her mama drinks so much. What Florence knows are sultry days spent with her grandparents, being cared for by their maid, Zenie, on the colored side of town.Tension builds during the summer of 1963. Mama bakes cakes at all hours to scrape by. And Zenie's niece Eva is in town, selling insurance to the blacks and stepping on Mr. Forrest's toes. When Eva is brutally assaulted, all hell breaks loose: Mama crashes her car, Florence's grandfather dies, a woman is murdered, and Florence finally gets a look in Daddy's box.Florence sees things that summer that she won't understand for years to come: her mother's disappearance, her father's racism. Years later, she'll face the truth and how she was caught in the middle of it. The Queen of Palmyra is rich in both setting and characters. It's an affecting tale of a girl who is loved yet lost, trying to make sense of the world in a tumultuous time, finally forced to confront the sins of her father.