"Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman's only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is only one respectable choice: marriage to a man she...

Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer prize-winning novel of a China that was now in a contemporary classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In the Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the...

Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by luck and chance. This is the story of one such child. As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast...

Set in rural Nebraska, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is both the story of an enduring friendship and a brilliant portrayal of the lives of rural pioneers in the late-nineteenth century. Ántonia and her family are from Bohemia and they must endure real hardship and loss to establish a new home in America. But Ántonia is never broken by adversity, and her strength and love of life stays with her childhood friend Jim for years to come, even as...

What happens when a young sophisticated Chicagoan falls for the owner of a farm on Johns Island, a lush Lowcountry paradise off the coast of South Carolina -- trading the bustle of a cosmopolitan city for the vagaries of a small southern town?

Twenty-seven-year-old Joanna Kurtz has made several trips to the altar, but never as a bride. The single young Amish woman is a closet writer with a longing to be published something practically unheard of in her Lancaster County community. Yet Joanna's stories aren't her only secret. She also has a beau who is courting her from afar, unbeknownst even to her sister, Cora, who, though younger, seems to have suitors to spare. Eben Troyer is a responsible...

"In Laura Childs's New York Times bestselling mystery series, Suzanne, Petra, and Toni--co-owners of the Cackleberry Club Café are back to track down another bad egg... Maintaining good personal relationships with their suppliers is one of the secrets of the Cackleberry Club Café success, so Suzanne doesn't mind going out to Mike Mullen's dairy farm to pick up some wheels of cheese. She's looking forward to a nice visit with the mild-mannered farmer...

Mae Lee Barnes saves her money earned while working in a munitions factory, buys farmland, and waits for her husband to return from WWII.

An Our Town for our times, The Mammoth Cheese is beautifully crafted and driven by warm, vibrant characters as it follows the residents of rural Three Chimneys, Virginia, on their journey to re-create the original Thomas Jefferson-era, 1,235-pound "Mammoth Cheese." As the book opens, the town is joyously celebrating the birth of the Frank Eleven: eleven babies simultaneously born to Manda and James Frank after fertility treatments. But as autumn progresses...

Forty-year-old widow Hush McGillen, having worked to create a booming apple orchard enterprise and to keep her son Davis from learning the truth about his philandering father, finds all her secrets exposed when Davis secretly marries the rebellious daughter of the President of the United States and brings her home to Georgia, along with her attractive bodyguard, Nicholas Jakobek.