Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag." In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard. Her father distrusted the medical establishment, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse....

"A stunning, lyrical coming-of-age novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl, with only the compass of her father's imagination, must navigate racism, sexism, and the dark secrets that will haunt her for the rest of her life. "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in Arkansas in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings....

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
 
Charles Frazier, the acclaimed author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, returns with a dazzling novel set in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s. With his brilliant portrait of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister’s troubled twins, Frazier has created his most memorable heroine. Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the...

"Fu Zao" is translated into English by Professor Howard Goldblatt titled "Turbulence" and released in 1991. It is a winner of the 1991 Pegasus Prize. It is a story about a fictional town Shang Zhou going through social reform. Shang Zhou's major river Zhou silently watched the town shift into market economy and with it, the changing values. The shift is told through the love story between Jin Gou, a peasant and Xiao Shui, that was mercilessly disapproved....

"After the death of her mother, Worri Dressar takes on the care of orphans near their Appalachian mountain home. Plagued with two good-for-nothing brothers, Worri fights to save her home and the children now in her care"--

"In these powerful rendered, prizewinning stories, working class African Americans across the South strive for meaning and search for direction in lives shaped by forces beyond their control."--from the cover.

"The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police...

Three stories taking place in a mining town in West Virginia intertwine, examining what it means to live, make connections, deal with trauma, and do more than just exist.

Even at the empires peak, the majority of ancient Romes population lived in rural areas. The Countryside in the Roman Empire takes a look at the lives of farmers, slaves, women, and children who worked the land to provide food for the entirety of Rome. The book includes descriptions of the villages, farms, and army outposts that served as the backbone of the empire.