"Willa Cather's third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg, a character inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. Thea's early life, however, has much in common with Cather's own. Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea's long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the...

God on the Rocks describes Margaret Marsh's coming of age one summer between the world wars. Caught in the backwash of a fervently religious father, a bitterly nostalgic mother and the bawdy jokes of her nanny, Margaret escapes by roaming the meadows and beaches of coastal England. When she meets two of her mother's childhood friends--Charles and his sister, Binkie. The siblings expose her to a side of Mrs. Marsh that she has never known. But as the...

While trying to deal with her depressed mother and her pious father in a small Midwest town in the 1960s, eleven-year-old Grace struggles with inherited psychic powers that her aunt calls "The Knowing." Grace Carter has the Knowing. It offers glimpses of people's pasts and futures, and allows Grace to talk to Isaac, her twin brother who died at birth. To Aunt Pearl, the Knowing is a family gift; to Grace's strict Evangelical pastor father, it's witchcraft....