Great Depression Fiction

Hattie Barton’s life changes forever on October 24, 1929, the historic day of the New York stock market crash. She is suddenly forced to leave her palatial home in Calhoun, relocate to an apartment in her hometown in Greenville, and find work to support herself, her two young daughters Pauline and Alice, and her trusted housekeeper, Georgia. When she takes a job as secretary in a small insurance firm, a potential romance develops between Hattie and her boss, Seth Snoddy However, an unexpected turn causes her to reevaluate whether she can ever settle for a marriage of convenience.

Set in the mid-1930s, Filthy Sugar tells the story of Wanda Whittle, a 19-year-old dreamer who models fur coats in an uptown department store, but who lives in a crowded rooming house with her hard-working widowed mother and shrewd older sister, Evelyn, in the “slums” behind the city’s marketplace; a world where “death is always close but life is stubborn”. Bored with the daily grind and still in shock from the sudden death of her father, Wanda finds both escapism and inspiration in celluloid fantasies....

A wonderful period piece, set in the time of the Great Depression. This audiobook follows two youths, as they struggle to cross the now-broken country to find their estranged family in rural California. In the process, they discover their own strengths and inevitable weaknesses. In the end, there are many lessons of life, survival, and respect for their fellow brethren.