"Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure...

Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, his arguments and...

"In Lydia Kiesling's debut novel, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler, Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent--her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a "processing error"--Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents in hopes that the quiet...

Washington County, Maine. Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie are teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region. For four years Georges followed their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times: the pain and joy of life in a region whose rugged beauty and stoicism mask dwindling populations, vanishing job opportunities, and pervasive opioid addiction. Their stories remind us of the value of timeless...

An opportunistic Southern lawyer compromises his ideals and exploits people to gain fame, only to be destroyed when he goes one step too far, becoming involved in bank fraud. By the author of Legacy of Silence.

Olivia Harker Cross owns a mountain -- or thinks she does -- in Pope County, Kentucky, a land where wolves howl at night. But now someone is killing the wolves on Big Foley Mountain, and Olivia is beginning to realize how much of her own bitter history she has never understood -- her mother's madness or her daughter's flight to California leaving her to raise William, her beloved grandson. But most of all, Olivia doesn't understand her town's rage,...

The ranch country of Montana is beautiful, unforgiving, and for Colton and Denver McLean, filled with a whole lot of bad memories. It's been seven years since a fire claimed their parents' lives and drove both brothers away. Now their uncle's death has brought them back to a place where loyalty and love runs deep-but so do grudges. Suspicion still swirls about what caused that tragic fire. It created a rift between Denver and the foreman's daughter,...

Looks at the medieval English village, Elton, and through it how medieval people lived their lives, births, marriages, deaths, loves, work, etc.

"A stunning, lyrical coming-of-age novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl, with only the compass of her father's imagination, must navigate racism, sexism, and the dark secrets that will haunt her for the rest of her life. "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in Arkansas in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1990

In And Their Children After Them, the writer/photographer team Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson return to the land and families captured in James Agee and Walker Evans’s inimitable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, extending the project of conscience and chronicling the traumatic decline of King Cotton. With this continuation of Agee and Evans’s project, Maharidge and Williamson...