Small Town America

Kalan Mars yearned to escape the cunning familiarity of small town life. He was labelled a clone. The bullet whizzed past his head. Kalan was thrown into a harrowing race for survival. Was he human, or was he a replica? The truth will unleash chaos.

The lonely predicament of Carol Kennicott, caught between her desires for social reform and individual happiness, reflects the position in which America's turn-of-the-century "emancipated woman" found herself.

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...

Holly Banks is on a desperate mission to have it all, but nothing in life goes according to plan. She’s quickly learning that keeping up with the Joneses is a full-time job, especially when the women of Primm, her new neighborhood, seem to have it together all the time. With her husband’s job in flux, her daughter’s difficulty with learning to read, and her mother’s new zest for dating, Holly’s life is already anything but picture perfect. Then her dog digs up an old artifact in the village center, and the mishap draws the attention of local media.

Unto the Altar of God by Lawrence D. Maloney is set in the 1958-1966 period and describes a teenage boy’s struggles to persevere in a rigorous Catholic seminary amid nagging personal doubts, the turmoil of the 1960s, and revolutionary changes in the Catholic Church triggered by the Second Vatican Council. Adding to these challenges in this coming-of-age memoir is the boy’s strong attraction to a girl who attends a convent school. The book, which has plenty of humor, romance and pop culture from the 50s and 60s, also shows the powerful influence of people in a small Western Pennsylvania ...

Right after high school, Joe Goffman left sleepy Bush Falls, Connecticut, and never looked back. Then he wrote a novel savaging everything in town, a novel that became a national bestseller and a huge hit movie. Fifteen years later, Joe is struggling to avoid the sophomore slump with his next novel when he gets a call: his father's had a stroke, so it's back to Bush Falls for the town's most famous pariah. His brother avoids him, his former classmates beat him up, and the members of the book club just hurl their copies of Bush Falls at his house.

Desiree Summer hates being the new girl in the small, close-knit town of Wishful Hollow, especially when she’s assigned to take on the town’s most eligible bachelor who’s turned speed dating into an art. She has a life ahead of her full of horses and places to go, but she also wants to please her recently widowed father. All bets are off when she meets Kyle Landon, the dreamy writer who collects the eerie and foreboding folktales in the hills and hollows. She follows him into the deep, dark woods, enchanted by his tales and haunted by old ruins whispering of lost love never found. ...

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.

In 2013, Ayaz Virji left a comfortable job at an East Coast hospital and moved to a town of 1,400 in Minnesota, feeling called to address the shortage of doctors in rural America. But in 2016, this decision was tested when the reliably blue, working-class county swung for Donald Trump. Virji watched in horror as his children faced anti-Muslim remarks at school and some of his most loyal patients began questioning whether he belonged in the community. Virji wanted out. But in 2017, a local pastor invited him to speak at her church....

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.

This is a story of love and friendship like no other. A story of a crime which shakes that love and friendship to the very core and begs an answer to the question "What would you do for love?". It is 1964, the Beatles are topping the charts in America while on the other side of world the Vietnam War is escalating. In a small, one-light town in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York lives Danny Fosse, who is an average fourteen-year old kid who is becoming more and more confused and disillusioned by the world around him. His idyllic small-town life takes a dreadful turn when one of his ...

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.

Lincoln Stanley is the first black farmer in Saxon County. Will he be the last? Missouri, 1934. In the late-night shadows of a remote barn the Saxon County Knights are born. Levi Manning is their leader. The Knights are his ticket away from the family farm he has run into the ground. Levi convinces the Knights to move - immediately and forcefully. Harvester Stanley, Lincoln's son, is privy to the Knights' plans. Though just fourteen, he uses wits and intelligence to stop the Knights in their tracks. If only it could stay that way. The Knights strike again, and within weeks innocent people ...

Set in the apocalyptic atmosphere of 1900 - a time when many Americans were looking for signs foretelling the end of the world - Feather Crowns is the story of a young woman who unintentionally creates a national sensation. A farm wife living near the small town of Hopewell, Kentucky, Christianna Wheeler gives birth to the first recorded set of quintuplets in North America. Christie is suddenly thrown into a swirling storm of public attention. Thousands of strangers descend on her home, all wanting too see and touch the "miracle babies."

Blood, sweat and tears are common in war but war doesn’t belong in a peaceful small town. Hickory Grove is no longer peaceful and it’s CJ Thompson’s fault. When he left Iraq, he hoped he’d be able to rest. When he found Jesse Evans, he found love and his rest came to an abrupt end. The people don’t want two men living together in their town and they’ve taken extreme measures to remove them to the point where it’s becoming dangerous for the two soldiers to remain there. CJ was born and raised in Hickory Grove. He doesn’t want to leave. Ever since Jesse left Afghanistan, ...

Cedar Hollow: Where Faith and Love Rebuild the Heart In the quaint town of Cedar Hollow, Emily Carter thought she had left her past behind. Driven by ambition and the allure of the city, she walked away from her small-town roots—and Adam Blake, the faithful carpenter who had captured her heart. But when a family milestone and a crumbling community center draw her back, Emily is faced with the memories she thought she’d buried and the man she never stopped loving. Adam has spent years rebuilding more than just wood and stone—he’s been mending the pieces of his life since Emily left. ...

Cyrus Brandt’s life is falling apart. Amid a disintegrating marriage and a failing career, he returns to his childhood home on an Illinois farm to make a new start. Adapting to the slow pace of his new environs, Cyrus quickly finds himself in a burgeoning romance with Annie, who owns a diner in the nearby town. But when a spring tornado deposits the body of a murdered man on a nearby rural roadside, Cyrus’ quiet new life is turned upside down. Annie’s brother, Sheriff Thomas Bales, is now caught up in a manhunt, and Cyrus volunteers to assist the sheriff’s under-staffed department ...

Winsor Glanvil pays court to Louise Carney, heiress to a fortune, and she agrees to marry him. The marriage is opposed by big Jack Rutledge, a jealous rival and formidable foe, so Glanvil and Louise plan to be married in a sequestered valley by a local clergyman. Rutledge and his supporters, learning of the plan, arrive in the valley ahead of the two and seize Glanvil. Glanvil is beaten mercilessly and Rutledge disfigures him, destroying one side of his face with the cutting edge of a spur. Rutledge then rejoins his gang in the clergyman’s house.

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.

hn Signal, fleeing from a murder charge in a fair fight, arrives in the mining town of Monument. Calling himself John Alias, he is made a deputy sheriff by Sheriff Peter Ogden, who puts Alias between two crooked factions and fails to give him any support.