Cranston Public Library

The classic novel of a Georgia family undone by the Great Depression: “[A] story of force and beauty” (New York Post). Even before the Great Depression struck, Jeeter Lester and his family were desperately poor sharecroppers. But when hard times begin to affect the families that once helped support them, the Lesters slip completely into the abyss. Rather than hold on to each other for support, Jeeter, his wife Ada, and...

A marked departure from Edith Wharton's usual ironic contemplation of the fashionable New York society to which she herself belonged, Ethan Frome is a sharply etched portrait of the simple inhabitants of a nineteenth-century New England village. The protagonist, Ethan Frome, is a man tormented by a passionate love for his ailing wife's young cousin. Trapped by the bonds of marriage and the fear of public condemnation, he is ultimately destroyed by...

"The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses."--

The trials of the four Scurvy children of Georgia to find the money to bury their mother who died giving birth to her fifth child. Since the two eldest, Pee-Wee and Buck, are good-for-nothing types and Alamand is a dreamer the task befalls to Loujean, the realist. By the author of Pawpaw Patch.

"Cora Slaughter grows up on a tobacco farm in Southern Virginia in the 1940's in an abusive environment. She dreams that one day a man will come along to take her away, but when Aaron finally does, her new situation is even more trying than the life she is fleeing."--Amazon.com.

The ambivalence of fireas evocation of glowing love and furious destructionpermeates this stunning first novel by Mark Childress, a young Southern writer who gives fresh expression to his region's literary preoccupations. A World Made of Fire is set in rural Alabama in the decades before World War I ... Childress has created a wholly believable world. The landscapes are forceful and the characters deeply felt. ... A World Made of Fire probes varieties...