First published in 1948, Cry, the Beloved Country stands as the single most important novel in twentieth century South African literature. A work of searing beauty, it is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its contemporaneity, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of...

This rich and moving novel traces the lives of two black heroines -- from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation. The one, Nel Wright, chooses to stay in the place of her birth, to marry, to raise a family, to become a pillar of the tightly knit black community. The other, Sula Peace, rejects all that Nel has accepted. She escapes to college,...

Blinking Jack Stokes was a skinny tenant farmer, and Ruby Pitt Woodrow was "the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry ... They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life."--Pbk. cover.

In the backwoods of Mississippi, Jewel, her husband Leston, and their five children learn to cope with their last-born child, Brenda Kay, born mentally retarded in 1943.

Trudi Montag is a Zwerg-a dwarf-short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share-from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he's a girl, to the Jews Trudi harbors in her cellar. Ursula Hegi brings us a timeless and unforgettable story in Trudi and a small town, weaving together a profound tapestry of emotional...

It's the summer of 1960 Atkinson, Vermont. Marie Fermoyle is a strong but vulnerable divorced woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for dangerous con man Omar Duvall.

March breaks up with her boyfriend, Hollis, and marries another. Twenty years later she visits her hometown, Hollis is a widower, and the romance resumes. But March forgot how violent he is.

A nurse escapes her abusive husband, a New York policeman, taking their son with her to Florida. She assumes a new identity and even finds romance, but there is a price, the 10-year-old boy misses his father and she lives in constant fear the father will find them, which he does. The novel analyzes why abused women wait so long to make their break.

A novel on the harsh life in the Appalachian Mountains at the turn of the century. The heroine is Julie Harmon whose work load includes hauling water, butchering a hog, rendering lard, plucking a turkey, baking and preserving--all described in detail.

A Los Angeles girl whose mother goes to jail is taken in hand by the city's foster-care program and the novel describes her experience in a series of homes, each a new adventure. A first novel.