Deeply unhappy about the separation of her family because of poverty, twelve-year-old Megan gradually finds contentment and purpose in her new home on the Kansas prairie with a kind and loving adopted family.

After years of separation, English-born Emmaline Bradford is shocked by the conditions on Geoffrey's Kansas sheep ranch and wishes to return to England immediately. But Geoffrey offers a compromise: If Emmaline promises to stay until spring, he'll pay her return fare if she decides to go back to her home country. When spring arrives, will Emmaline return to England, or will she marry Geoffrey and carve out a life with him in Kansas?

National Book Award Finalist
The basis for Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward
 
“A perfect novel . . . economical, piquant, beautiful, true” that chronicles the lives of a wealthy family in 1930s Kansas through the eyes of its matriarch (Meg Wolitzer, New York Times–bestselling author).
In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate...

Fed up with the poor quality of life in 1880 New York, Tarsie Raines encourages her friends Joss and Mary Brubacher to move with their two children to Drayton Valley, Kansas, a booming town hailed in the guidebook as the land of opportunity. She offers to help with expenses and to care for Mary and the children as they travel west by wagon train. But when tragedy strikes on the trip across the prairie, Tarsie is thrown into an arrangement with Joss...

Yoder loves her job as a housekeeper for elderly couple Job and Dinah Keim. Their only children, a son and daughter, left the Haven, Kansas, district and their faith more than twenty years earlier with no contact. When Child Protective Services shows up on the Keims' doorstep with their five grandchildren, their quiet lives-- and Cassie's-- are turned upside down. Mason, the oldest grandson at twenty-two, believes his siblings should be his responsibility...

It's the Garden of Eden. And the weather is absolutely freezing! The discovery of the body of a young man inside the mausoleum of the Civil War veteran who commissioned this bizarre sculpture park makes the blood of Undersheriff Lottie Albright and her husband's Aunt Dorothy run cold. Dorothy Mercer, paying a visit to Western Kansas from Manhattan, may be a bestselling mystery novelist, but she is truly shocked confronting murder firsthand. But the...

Set in Appalachia and the Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century and inspired by the author's family lore, this exquisite novel paints an intimately rendered portrait of one resilient farm family's challenges and hard-won triumphs--helmed by an unforgettable heroine. Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina "Bertie" Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly. She knows how to lance a boil, make...

These three seemingly unrelated stories collide at the Solomon Springs natural wonder held sacred for centuries because of its legendary healing properties. Murder shatters the spiritual calm that is Solomon Spring. Seeking solace from the turbulent life she has led, Eden Murdoch returns to the Solomon Spring. The tranquility of this timeless place will soon be corrupted by a local businessman who plans to exploit the sacred waters of the Spring....

Without rain or topsoil, Anna Mae Phipps and her husband Harley struggle to provide for their two young children on their family farm. With another baby on the way, Harley sells his mules and travels a hundred miles to earn money building an elaborate WPA monument. But after only receiving Harley's first paycheck, Anna Mae grows increasingly desperate as months drag on without even a word from her husband.

Small-town police chief Daniel Wren blew in like a tornado, sweeping city slicker Susan Donovan off her feet and back home to Hampstead, Kansas, as his bride. Ten days later, he's killed by a sniper. Determined to find his killer, Susan, formerly one of San Francisco's finest, becomes the acting police chief.