When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.In A Virtuous Woman, Kaye Gibbons t...

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy."So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heart/...

When Gap Creek was published in 1999, it became an instant national bestseller, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers to the 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 of the years following? What did the future hold for these memorable characters?The Road to Gap Creek answers t...

Finalist for the Pulitzer PrizeFrom the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty...

Set against the backdrop of the early 1960s Chicago jazz scene, a highly ambitious and stylish literary debut that combines the atmosphere and period detail of Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility with the emotional depth and drama of The Memory Keeper's Daughter, about a talented but troubled singer, her precocious ten-year-old daughter, and their heartbreaking relationship.It is the early 1960s, and Chicago is a city of uneasy tensions—segregation, sexual experimentat...

Blame is a spellbinding novel of guilt and love, family and shame, sobriety and the lack of it, and the moral ambiguities that ensnare us all.Patsy MacLemoore, a history professor in her late twenties, has a brand-new PhD from Berkeley and a wild streak. She wakes up in jail after an epic alcoholic blackout. “Okay, what’d I do?” she asks her lawyer and jailers. In fact, two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a mother and daughter, are dead, run over in Patsy’s driveway.Patsy wil...

After their mother’s probable suicide, Jazz and Olivia Moon struggle to move on with their lives. Olivia, an eighteen-year-old who can taste words and see sounds, blinds herself by staring at the sun, then decides to walk to the remote setting of her mother’s unfinished novel to resuscitate her hopes and dreams. Jazz, twenty-two, plagued by unresolved conflict with her mother and a hidden trove of her unsent letters, takes a job in a funeral home before being forced back into the role of h...

Southern housewife Linwood Breedlove Scott was happily content in her comfortable thirty-year marriage, but when her husband cleans out their bank accounts and runs off with a stripper, her life takes a hilarious, yet touching, right turn into reality. With no place to go but home, she's forced back to her eccentric family she escaped by marrying at nineteen. But despite her newly dependent situation, Lin begins to stand on her own two feet and wake up to the joys—and perils—of life as a s...

Against a backdrop of peach orchards and languid summer afternoons, Dori Sanders spins a wise, sweet tale of crossing racial barriers in the South Carolina countryside. It was unthinkable that Gaten Hill, a successful black man, would marry Sara Kate, an uppercrust white woman. It was unbelievable that hours after his wedding, he would be killed in a devastating accident. Left to grieve together, Gaten's 10-year-old daughter, Clover, and her white stepmother forge a warm friendship which g...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train, and the critically acclaimed author of Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be*,* comes a novel about buried secrets and the redemptive power of forgiveness—includes a special PS section featuring insights, interviews, and more.Cassie Simon is a struggling artist living in New York City. When she receives a call from a magistrate in Sweetwater, TN, telling her she has inherited sixty ...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train, and the critically acclaimed author of Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be*,* comes a novel about friendship and the memories that haunt us—includes a special PS section featuring insights, interviews, and more.On the night of her high school graduation, Kathryn Campbell sits around a bonfire with her four closest friends, including the beautiful but erratic Jennifer. “I’ll be fin...

When is a marriage worth saving and when is it best to let go? When do half-truths turn into full-blown lies? When does betrayal end and passion begin?Say When is a compelling, complex novel that takes readers into the heart of a modern marriage where companionship and intimacy, and denial and pain, so often collide. “Of course he knew she was seeing someone,” begins the story of Frank Griffin, a man who’s willing to overlook his wife’s infidelity—he would let her have...