"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...

"There was a time when the world was sweeter... when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats. Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town's Baptist minister......

Explores the experience of miracles in everyday life through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old girl, the granddaughter of a fundamentalist minister.

Minister's daughter Olivia Dunne, pushed into a hastily arranged marriage to beet farmer Ray Singleton after a one-night stand with a departing American soldier leaves her pregnant, slowly relinquishes her long-held dreams of study and travel as she comes to love and admire her husband.

Written between 1873 and 1884 and published posthumously in 1903, The Way of All Flesh is regarded by some as the first twentieth-century novel. Samuel Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood shines an iconoclastic light on the hypocrisy of a Victorian clerical family's domestic life. It also foreshadows the crumbling of nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals in the aftermath of the First World War, as well as 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...

"Based on [the author']s own experiences as a young man, the book's two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in [the author's] own words, 'a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes...

"Curtis Black is no stranger to scandal. Throughout the decades, he has done much in the public eye, both good and evil. But what most people don't realize is that Curtis has been hiding a horrific childhood, which has affected him in countless, unspeakable ways. His buried past returns in an unwelcome visit when his estranged sister becomes alarmingly ill and his youngest child, twelve-year-old Curtina, becomes the kind of problem daughter that he...

Mark Cloud, the son of a Baptist preacher, is uprooted when his family moves from Fort Worth, Texas to Fred, a tiny town in East Texas, and struggles through his teenage years coming to terms with life in a small town.