Rural America

Allison: When I left for California, I gave myself a new name and never looked back. Now my carefully crafted good-girl image is getting torn to shreds in the press thanks to my Oscar-winning A-hole of an ex-boyfriend. So I escape to the only safe haven I know and trust - my hometown - to take a breather while I plot my triumphant Hollywood comeback. However, when I arrive at my parents’ house, Jackson Burke answers the door instead. And suddenly the past comes rushing back.... Jackson: First kiss. First time. First love. Allison Murphy and I shared a lot of firsts.

An exploration of family, our desires, and our shortcomings. FYI: References to He-Man and Wiffle ball are included. --- It has been years since Keenan had been to the farm. He had vowed to move on, to move up, but this has brought him back. To his introverted older brother and confident sister. After this, their lives will never be the same.

Lew Sherry and Pete Lang accept an offer they simply can't resist. Oliver Wilton is willing to pay the cowboys $1,000 a day for ten days to protect him from danger that has him living in a state of terror. A seafaring man has arrived at the inn in town and has made no secret of the fact that he's come to settle a score with Wilton.

Story telling at its best! A Tater Knob Almanac is set in a remote Alabama mountain community during the late 1940s and early '50s. Based on real people, real places and real adventures, these 68 heart-warming short stories are told through the eyes of three intrepid country boys and one just-as-gutsy girl. Through them, you'll meet a large and memorable supporting cast of other characters who spent much of their lives as patch farmers, trappers, fishermen, and ginseng diggers. With money and modern conveniences in short supply among their families, these four kids certainly had to work ...

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the DC metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe.

A Cricket of a Girl is a historical fiction/coming-of age novel. Set in the tiny, war-stricken Latin American country of El Salvador, in the 1950s and 1960s, it is the story of the unlikely friendship of two women, one American and one Salvadorian, who form an unlikely friendship in spite, or perhaps because of the poverty, sexual abuse and death they have been forced to confront. A Cricket of a Girl is a heartwarming and optimistic tale that will stay with you long after you put down the book.

Belle Gunness was a farmer, a mother, and a murderer who lured victims to her Indiana farm with promises of love and opportunity. But behind the idyllic rural façade lay a gruesome reality—a farm where dreams were shattered, lives were stolen, and secrets were buried. Dubbed the "Black Widow of La Porte," Belle’s chilling crimes have haunted history for over a century. Whispers from the Murder Farm peels back the layers of this twisted case, exploring Belle’s calculated methods, the psychology behind her crimes, and the failures of law enforcement that allowed her to evade justice.

In a dusty town in Nebraska’s rugged sandhills, weary Sheriff’s Deputy Harley Jensen patrols the streets at night, on the lookout for something - anything - out of the ordinary. It’s July 1978, and the heat is making people ornery, restless. That and the Reddick family patriarch has decided, decades after authorities ended the search for his murdered boy’s body, to lay a headstone. Instead of bringing closure, this decision is the spark that threatens to set Pickard County ablaze.

With Pastor Roye on leave for six months, Marshland Baptist Church must find a preacher willing to serve in the interim. Meanwhile, nobody can figure out why the teen car washes are raking in hundreds of dollars in a town out in the middle of nowhere. Good fortune seems to follow the youth group, but the Sheriff is a little suspicious. Still, when the hearty, smiling Bill Manley shows up to be a temp preacher, the church's good luck seems to be holding. Then again .... Narrated with fondness and affection, the Marshland Baptist Chronicles detail the lives of the residents of Marshland, NC, ...

This groundbreaking study of agriculture's role in the war defies long-held notions that Northern industrialization and urbanization led to clashes between North and South. Huston argues that the ideological chasm between plantation owners in the South and family farmers in the North led to the political eruption of 1854-1856 and the birth of a sectionalized party system.

He’s in it to win it. But when he brings in a troubled teen as a ringer, is the price of success too high? Vietnam vet Donny Doyle has a job no one wants: coaching Tsalagee High’s basement-dwelling football team. And despite the school’s decade-long record of failure, he promises to deliver the backwater Oklahoma town a state championship. But the only way to do it is to recruit a terrifying, mammoth kid straight out of juvenile detention. Battling his own PTSD, Coach Doyle struggles to tame his ticking time bomb of a player into a disciplined gridiron beast. And after a fast five-win...

Una saga familiare del XX secolo in cui si rispecchiano la storia e il destino di tutto un popolo. Un grande affresco che per fascino ed emozione può ricordare al lettore, nell'ambito della letteratura sudamericana, soltanto "Cent'anni di solitudine" di García Márquez.

What is a normal life, anyway? Perfect parents, who never argued or made a mistake? Some 2.2 perfectly behaved children who magically morphed into honor students, then doctors and lawyers with no problems, or nary a regret? All this, evolving from the safety of some picket fence inside the boundaries of which never a harsh word was spoken? How far back must you go in your family before hitting grief or hurt? Steve Watkins never knew what to call it, but he knew something about growing up on a small rural farm in the 1980s felt different. Something strange and out of the ordinary.

Who are the Minutemen? Patriots? Racists? Vigilantes? Harel Shapira lived with the Minutemen and patrolled the border with them, seeking neither to condemn nor praise them, but to understand who they are and what they do. Challenging simplistic depictions of these men as right-wing fanatics with loose triggers, Shapira discovers a group of men who long for community and embrace the principles of civic engagement. Yet these desires and convictions have led them to a troubling place.

A small-town girl with a tragic past - An English billionaire with a secret - An old ranch that brings them together When a handsome, brooding stranger from England finds his way to the small American town called Misty Springs and turns everyone’s lives upside down, Abigail is forced to question everything she’s ever believed in. It's suddenly obvious that opposites do attract. Despite her reluctance, Thomas wiggles his way into her heart. Sparks fly, and nothing will ever be the same again. But just when she may have found true happiness, a secret threatens to destroy everything. This ...

When Andrew Apperley visits his brother David in the East, he brings along an unexpected companion. Andrew's giant wolf dog, Comanche, is so wild that he has to be chained up for the safety of others. However, when the Apperley brothers come across a man drowning in the East River, Comanche breaks loose from his chains and swims to the man's rescue.

It's the 1790s, and the circus has arrived in Durham, Maine. Before weaver Will Rees is able to take in its spectacle, he spots Magistrate Hanson - the man he blames for his family's having to flee Dugard two years earlier. On his journey home he encounters Shaker brothers searching for a girl from their Zion community. Despite women not being allowed inside the circus, Leah had snuck out to visit it. They quickly come across her lifeless body beaten and thrown into a farmer's field on the road leading to the circus.

No Friday Night Lights is the story of a rural Nevada high school football team that never wins. Veteran reporter John M. Glionna examines the 2022 season in which the McDermitt Bulldogs practiced for weeks in the summer only to learn once again that they had come up short of the necessary players due to the dwindling population on the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation on the Nevada-Oregon border.

On December 6, 1941, the rural township of Cussler was making final preparations for the town’s Christmas gala held every year. Nobody in the township, or the entire country, could predict that Sunday, December 7, 1941, would end far differently than anyone would ever imagine. The following morning during the gala, news broke of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The mood turned from celebratory to solemn in a matter of minutes as the reports of the attack on the Pacific Fleet came in. After the attack, the nation became galvanized, and over the coming weeks and months, the ...

Autumn whispered to the wind, “I fall but always rise again.” For a long time, tree sprite Scarlet Oak has watched autumn fall and rise in the same way amidst her forested society of sprites. Wingless and bound to live and die with her birth oak, Horace, she longs for a deeper existence. Then, in 1977, her world is shaken when an autistic boy wanders into her woodland and they share a soulful moment before he takes his life on her tree. Smis, a Grim Reaper, arrives to usher the boy’s spirit to the Dark, but Scarlet insists that the boy did not intend to die. In a rare show of mercy, ...