Born in East Berlin, Julia is eight when her actress mother uproots her family of four girls, by different fathers, in search of a better life. Their eventual landing in the remote countryside of Schleswig-Holstein solves no problems for this fractured household.Desperate to escape a childhood of rural poverty, neglect and shame, the lonely child becomes addicted to writing. Aged 13, she leaves her family. At school in West Berlin, she finally encounters love.In this grippi...

Before humankind could talk, tell stories, or build collective endeavours, it was 'rhythmic movement in time' that gave the first spark to the human instinct to collaborate. Dance supported a massive switch in human orientation which set the stage for our extraordinary evolutionary journey.Dance made settlement and survival, belonging and language, ultimately possible. In dance, shared movement, energy exchanges, spontaneous patterns, and communal spaces are forged. Thus, fears and...

From the award-winning author of Over the Plain Houses, comes a major novel about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras.Edie Carrigan didn't plan to "get herself" pregnant, much less end up in a home for unwed mothers. In 1950s North Carolina, illegitimate pregnancy is kept secret, wayward women require psychiatric cures, and adoption is always the best solution. Not even Edie’s closest friend, Luce Waddell, understands wh...

It’s 1939, and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent’s self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie’s fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband’s bed, storing strange keepsakes in a...

It’s 1939, and the federal government has sent USDA agent Virginia Furman into the North Carolina mountains to instruct families on modernizing their homes and farms. There she meets farm wife Irenie Lambey, who is immediately drawn to the lady agent’s self-possession. Already, cracks are emerging in Irenie’s fragile marriage to Brodis, an ex-logger turned fundamentalist preacher: She has taken to night ramblings through the woods to escape her husband’s bed, storing strange keepsakes in a...

A boy searches for his fugitive brother in 1960s Minnesota in this New York Times bestseller—"a stunning debut novel [of] faith, miracles, and family" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).An eleven-year-old asthmatic boy, Reuben Land has reason to believe in miracles. But he will soon learn that life, even when touched by the divine, is never easy. Along with his father and poetically inclined sister, Reuben finds himself on a cross-country search ...

The Devil is known by many names: Serpent, Tempter, Beast, Adversary, Wanderer, Dragon, Rebel. His traps and machinations are the stuff of legends. His faces are legion. No matter what face the devil wears, Sympathy for the Devil.

The dystopian epic of World Made by Hand continues in a novel hailed as "Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove, set in the dystopian world of The Road" ( New York Journal of Books).A new age has begun on Earth. Oil is no longer a resource. Some parts of America are nuclear wastelands. Civilization has devolved into a constant struggle for food, water, and shelter.In the tiny hamlet of Union Grove, New York, the US government is l...

Annie Proulx’s first novel, which received huge acclaim and launched an outstanding literary career.‘Postcards’ is the story of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime on the run from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. The odyssey begins on a freezing Vermont hillside in 1944 and propels Blood across the American West for forty years. Denied love and unable to settle, he lives a hundred different lives: mining gold, growing beans, huntin...

In 1929, an explosion in a Missouri dance hall killed forty-two people. Who was to blame? Mobsters from St Louis? Embittered gypsies? The preacher who cursed the waltzing couples for their sins? Or could it just have been a colossal accident?Alma Dunahew, whose scandalous younger sister was among the dead, believes the answer lies in a dangerous love affair, but no one will listen to a maid from the wrong side of the tracks. It is only decades later that her grandson hears her vers...

A heartwarming Harmony tale for the holiday season from a master storytellerFor once Sam Gardner will not be unprepared. Determined to redeem a dreadful history of gift-giving, Sam decides to go all out this year. He enrolls in a scrap-booking class, convinced that this will be a Christmas Barbara will never forget. However, Sam’s absence from their home every Wednesday night, coupled with his fishy alibi of a men’s group he’s now attending, raises Barbara’s suspicions. She knows S...

When New and Selected Poems, Volume One was originally published in 1992, Mary Oliver was awarded the National Book Award. In the fourteen years since its initial appearance it has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry in the country. This collection features thirty poems published only in this volume as well as selections from the poet's first eight books.Mary Oliver's perceptive, brilliantly crafted poems about the natural landscape and the fundamental questio...