Young Bo spends the summer with his grandfather in the country and has a wonderful time.

When her father suddenly quits his job, the almost-ten-year-old, friendless Penny and her neglectful parents leave their privileged life in the city for a ramshackle property in the eccentric town of Thrush Junction, Tennessee.

When her thirty-year marriage broke up, Sue Hubbell found herself alone and broke on a small Ozarks farm. Keeping bees, she found solace in the natural world. She began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things that she cared about. The result is one of the best-loved books ever written about life on the land, about a woman finding her way in middle age..

During a trip to the country, curiosity and excitement get Violet, the little white cat, into all kinds of trouble, much to the dismay of Alice's uncle, who "was never much of a cat person."

Irene, a lonely nineteen-year-old in rural North Carolina, works long nights at the local pool hall, serving pitchers and dodging drunks. One evening, her hilarious, magnetic coworker Luce invites her on a joyride through the mountains to take revenge on a particularly creepy customer. Their adventure not only spells the beginning of a dazzling friendship, it seduces both girls into the mysterious world of pills and the endless hustles needed to fund...

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel
"Don't be fooled by the novel's apparent simplicity: What emerges from the surface is a tale of extraordinary emotional power, one of longstanding pain set against the pulsating drumbeat of social change."
-Sarah Weinman, NPR.org

For twenty years, Celia Scott has watched her husband, Arthur, hide from the secrets surrounding his sister Eve's death. But when the 1967 Detroit riots frighten

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When their father is sent away to prison, three London children move to the country where they keep busy preventing accidents on the nearby railway, making many new friends, and generally learning a good deal about themselves.

When two brothers rescue the powerful and usually unfriendly Mr. Richard from drowning, and then the younger boy and his father help Mr. Richard clear a field of stones, the father--a farmer who owes Mr. Richard money--has his debt forgiven.

In rural Indiana in 1904, fifteen-year-old Russell's dream of quitting school and joining a wheat threshing crew is disrupted when his older sister takes over as the teacher at his one-room schoolhouse after mean old Myrt Arbuckle "hauls off and dies." Russell and his friends are more determined than ever to close the school, even if it means stealing, setting the outhouse on fire, and bringing snakes to class.

"Sarah Menkedick spent her twenties trekking alone across South America, teaching English to recalcitrant teenagers on Reunion Island, picking grapes in France and camping on the Mongolian grasslands; for her, meaning and purpose were to be found on the road, in flight from the ordinary. Yet the biggest and most transformative adventure of her life might be one she never anticipated: at 31, she moves into a tiny 19th-century cabin on her family's...