During the Great Depression, rural Vermont suffers along with the rest of the country, and Henry Talcott, with only occasional work as a butcher, is reduced to moving into a tent on the edge of Black Pond with his two children. Their beautiful but unreliable mother has left them, and Henry is devastated by her desertion. He hasn't told Thomas or Margaret why she left-or if she will return. Told from twelve-year-old Thomas's perspective, The Lost...

The Fourth of July delivers more than just the local display of fireworks for Samuel and Julia Wortham. They return from the festivities in Dearing, Illinois, to find Samuel's brother Edward, out of prison and on their doorstep. Surprise turns to shock and confusion as Edward introduces a young girl named Katie and declares that Samuel is her father. Samuel maintains his innocence and cannot understand why his brother would make up such a story,...

Lark Erhardt, the six-year-old narrator of The Cape Ann, and her fiercely independent mother dream of owning their own house; they have their hearts set on the Cape Ann, chosen from a house catalog. But when Lark's father's gambling threatens the down payment her mother has worked so hard to save, Lark's mother takes matters into her own indomitable hands. A disarmingly involving portrait of a family struggling to stay together through the Great Depression,...

When an English biographer, Mr Moxom, sets out to write a story on the Rose Street Massacre of 1933, he interviews elderly Honora Beecher, one of the few remaining survivors 50 years later. He wants to know everything and sets out to get Honora's and her late husband's life story to tell the tale. Honora and Sexton Beecher find their lives forever changed when they are rendered virtually penniless by the crash of the stock market, forcing Sexton...

When Robert Morgan's novel Gap Creek was published in 1999, it became an Oprah Book Club Selection and an instant national bestseller, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers to its story of a marriage begun with love and hope at the turn of the twentieth century. Set in the Appalachian South, it followed Julie and Hank Richards as they struggled through the first year and a half of their union. But what, readers asked, of the years that followed?...

"In 1935 three women are forever changed when one of the most powerful hurricanes in history barrels toward the Florida Keys. For the tourists traveling on Henry Flagler's legendary Overseas Railroad, Labor Day weekend is an opportunity to forget the economic depression gripping the nation. But one person's paradise can be another's prison, and Key West-native Helen Berner yearns to escape. After the Cuban Revolution of 1933 leaves Mirta Perez's family...