"Orphaned Jim Burden rides the trains from Virginia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, where he will live with his paternal grandparents. Jake, a farmhand from Virginia, rides with the 10-year-old boy. On the same train, headed to the same destination, is the Shimerda family from Bohemia. Jim lives with his grandparents in the home they have built, helping as he can with chores to ease the burden on the others. The home has the dining room and kitchen downstairs,...

"Alexandra, daughter of a Swedish immigrant farmer in Nebraska, inherits the family farm and finds love with an old friend." "The heroic battle for survival of simple pioneer folk in the Nebraska country of the 1880s. John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother alng to a new zest...

Thomas Hardy's classic tale of a woman brave enough to defy convention: Soon to be a major motion picture starring Carey MulliganSpirited, impulsive, and beautiful, Bathsheba Everdene arrives in Wessex to live with her aunt. She strikes up a friendship with a neighbor, Gabriel Oak, and even saves the young shepherd's life. But when he responds by asking for her hand in marriage, she refuses. She cannot sacrifice her independence for a man she does...

Virginia and Jonathan care for young Mindy, the daughter of Virginia's childhood friend. The troubled young mother has drifted in and out of her daughter's life over the years, and now she suddenly reappears. Through it all. Virginia learns a reliance on God she didn't know was possible, growing through daily encounter and unexpected situations into a woman of strength and character.

In 1887, when her missionary parents have gone to China without her, snobbish twelve-year-old Julia is sent to a farm in upstate New York where she breaks a leg, while it mends learns to love and accept her country cousins and heal her anger.

On a poor farm near Starkfield in western Massachusetts, Ethan Frome struggles to wrest a living from the land, unassisted by his whining and hypochondrialcal wife Zeena. Zeena's young cousin Mattie Silver is left destitute, and only place she can go is to Ethan's farm. An embittered man and an enchanting young woman meet in such circumstances, unleashing predictable consequences as passions are aroused between the three protagonists.

Clara's dream of enriching her rough life on the family farm is fulfilled when a horse-drawn book wagon visits with the country's first traveling library.

Two sisters struggle with their roles as women within the family and within society as an arsonist threatens their post-Civil War Vermont community.

"An historical novel set in 1914 that follows a family of German immigrants who trade city living for the harsh realities of Pennsylvania farm life. Among other challenges, anti-German sentiment spreads across America with the outbreak of World War I"--

"A bold, heartfelt tale of life at Green Gables ... before Anne: A marvelously entertaining and moving historical novel, set in rural Prince Edward Island in the nineteenth century, that imagines the young life of spinster Marilla Cuthbert, and the choices that will open her life to the possibility of heartbreak, and unimaginable greatness. Her budding romance with John Blythe, the charming son of a neighbor, offers her a possibility of future happiness,...