Seemingly a girl who has everything, Natalie, at seventeen, goes in pursuit of her real mother.

When Leah and her husband moved to France, it was with the dream of becoming self-sufficient. But in truth, it's not the 'good life' she'd imagined, as three hours of digging barely yields a single straggly carrot. Worse, her teenage daughter is acting up, and her husband seems to find every strange excuse under the hot French sun to disappear.So when her friend entreats her to join the new bookclub she's forming, Leah decides it's something she will...

Struggling with her parent's divorce and her grandmother's dementia, fifteen-year-old Sarah Khan tries to distract herself in a home renovation project. She finds that the house is full of dark family secrets that give rise to ghostly apparitions. The plaster and stone hold secrets that have Sara clinging desperately to the memories of her old life-- secrets that she is powerless to ignore. And dark truths that ensure nothing will ever be the same....

A tale of violence and sex among rural poor in the American South, the novel was highly controversial in its time. It is the story of Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his family, who are trapped by the bleak economic conditions of the Depression as well as by their own limited intelligence and destructive sexuality. Its tragic ending is almost foreordained by the characters' inability to change their lives. Caldwell's skillful use of dialect...