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Bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town and the conflicting forces at its heart--hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. Told through a cast of characters whose...
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"One woman's tenacious journey to escape poverty and create a billion-dollar farming business--without ever leaving the land she loved. The youngest of her parents' combined twenty-one children, Sarah Frey grew up on a struggling farm in Southern Illinois, often having to grow, catch, or hunt her own dinner. She spent much of her early childhood dreaming of running away to Hollywood, Chicago--or really anywhere with central heating. At fifteen, she...
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"In the waning days of the Civil War, brothers Prentiss and Landry, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, seek refuge on the homestead of George Walker and his wife, Isabelle. The Walkers, wracked by the loss of their only son to the war, hire the brothers to work their farm, hoping through an unexpected friendship to stanch their grief. Prentiss and Landry, meanwhile, plan to save money for the journey north and a chance to reunite with their mother,...
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Set in South Africa under white rule, Doris Lessing's first novel is at once a chronicle of human disintegration, an understated social critique, and a depiction of the quiet horror of one woman's struggle against a ruthless fate. Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison. Mary's despair...
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O Pioneers! (1913) was Willa Cather's first great novel, and to many it remains her unchallenged masterpiece. No other work of fiction so faithfully conveys both the sharp physical realities and the mythic sweep of the transformation of the American frontier-- and the transformation of the people who settled it. Cather's heroine is Alexandra Bergson, who arrives on the wind-blasted prairie of Hanover, Nebraska, as a girl and grows up to make it a...