"In a suburban Atlanta neighborhood where divorce is a rampant as kudzu, Mary Bliss McGowan doesn't notice that her own marriage is in trouble until the summer night she finds a note from her husband, Parker telling her he's gone--and has taken the family fortune with him. Stunned and humiliated, a desperate Mary Bliss, left behind with her seventeen-year-old daughter, Erin, and a mountain of debt, decides to salvage what's left of her life by telling...

In the tiny Georgia hamlet of Between (population: 91), the only news is the seemingly never-ending feud between the Crabtrees and the Fretts. Caught at the crux of the quarrel is Nonny Frett, the biological daughter of impoverished teenager Hazel Crabtree. Soon after her birth, Nonny was left "on the better side of the tracks" with the relatively affluent Frett family. Now grown up and badly married, this true "betweener" must confront old family...

From the author of The Keepers of the House, a “beautiful” novel following a black mother and daughter through the Great Depression and Civil Rights era (The Boston Globe).
Mary is an orphaned, homeless, African American child, abandoned by the rest of her family and left to care for her younger brother. She becomes a “roadwalker,” a nomad who wanders across the rural south and quickly learns to rely...

"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book." A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty...

The life of newly orphaned, fourteen-year-old Dove is transformed by a group of devout African-American women at a Southern shelter where she and her seventeen-year-old stepmother take refuge with Dove's younger siblings in the midst of a custody battle.

This is the story of Virginia Turner Ballard, know to her North Carolina relatives as Ginny Sue. It's also the story of her mother, her grandmother, her great aunts, her closest cousin--three generations of women who gather around Virginia to help her at the end of a hard pregnancy, to tend to her, to help her prepare for the fourth generation. This kind of family attendance, this kind of tending to, is Southern to the core, offering, as it does,...

A charming, wise, funny and straightforward story of a marriage between a small-town Baptist and a big-city Episcopalian who share a love of bluegrass music.

A story from an author's childhood of lovingly making fruitcakes from scratch at Christmas-time with his elderly cousin, and has stood the test of time to become known as an American holiday classic.

People have always fascinated sociologist Perry Warren, yet his most personal relationships--with his wife and young son--are in shambles. If his marriage crumbles, will his son be raised fatherless, just as he was? Hoping distance will offer answers, Perry accepts a writing project in the town of Derby, South Carolina, and there discovers a wealth of research--and a reason to hope--in the strange yet fascinating neighbors next door. Eldeen Rafferty...

"[The] South blooms again in Augusta Trobaugh's River Jordan." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Sometimes a family grows from the most unlikely of friends.
A lonely little girl living with a strict stepfather and mother. A woman just released from prison, seeking a job and a new purpose for her life. An aging matriarch with a sense of humor and a compassionate heart. Sit a spell by the gentle river of their merged lives.
By the acclaimed...