Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Ballad novels volume 4
Summary
Award-winning Southern writer Sharyn McCrumb is a best-selling author who's won widespread critical acclaim for her Appalachian Ballad novels. In The Rosewood Casket, a farmer named Randall Stargill has fallen into a coma. As his family gathers to prepare for the inevitable, his four sons work on a handmade casket and their wives sew a quilt to line it. Complications arise, however, when clairvoyant neighbor Nora Bonesteel brings her own disturbing...
4) Gap Creek
Author
Series
Summary
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.
5) Oral history
Author
Summary
"A curse laid on the inhabitants of Hoot Owl Holler follows each succeeding generation for a century, in a tale of love, murder, obsession, and betrayal set in Appalachia."--NoveList.
Author
Series
Fever Devilin volume 2
Summary
Fever Devilin was raised amongst the hill-country people of the deep Georgia Appalachians and their seemingly simple folk ways are in his blood and his soul. His own family, however, was another matter and at sixteen he left home for college, returning only rarely and always under protest. In the years to come, Fever became a noted folklorist of the Appalachian region and a college professor. He never quite adjusted to the realities of city life and...
Author
Series
Fever Devilin volume 3
Summary
Fever Devilin is a folklorist who fled the fevered halls of academia to return home to the Blue Mountain region of the Georgia Appalachians and a hopefully quiet life. While on a trip collecting folklore, Fever spots an apparition at a railroad crossing. Such apparitions are traditionally omens of evil, and when he returns home, he finds his suspicions are accurate: his friend Lucinda's two nieces have been killed in a suspicious accident. As he consoles...
Author
Summary
Author of many novels and short stories, best-selling writer Lee Smith has received numerous awards for her works, including two O Henry Awards. Fair and Tender Ladies is an epistolary novel that traces the life of Ivy Rowe, born in the isolated Virginia mountain community of Sugar Fork. Through births and deaths, marriages and funerals, the decades of Ivy's life are captured in a rich dialect that carries the sounds and sights of the Appalachians...
Author
Summary
"Wylodine comes from a world of paranoia and poverty; her family grows marijuana illegally, and life has always been a battle. Now she's been left behind to tend the crop alone. Then spring doesn't return for the second year in a row, bringing unprecedented, extreme winter. With grow lights stashed in her truck and a pouch of precious seeds, she begins a journey, determined to start over away from Appalachian Ohio. But the icy roads and strangers...
10) Sutter's Cross
Author
Summary
Men and women of all ages will warm to Cramer's elegant prose and Southern charm. William Faulkner once insisted that great stories must capture the "old universal truths...love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." Sutter's Cross delivers the truth in grand style. Sutter's Cross is a resort town in the southern Appalachians, where people live in comfortable homes, have comfortable portfolios, and wear comfortable clothes. They...
11) Clay's quilt
Author
Summary
On a bone-chilling New Year's Day, when all the mountain roads are slick with ice, Clay's mother, Anneth, insists on leaving her husband. She packs her things, and with three-year-old Clay in tow, they inch their way toward her hometown along the treacherous mountain roads.
That journey ends in the death of Clay's mother. It's a day that comes to haunt her only son, who's left without a family and a history. This is the story of how Clay Sizemore,...
Author
Series
Summary
Velva Jean Hart, the fiercely independent heroine of Jennifer Niven's spectacular debut novel, Velva Jean Learns to Drive, returns in a captivating adventure that literally sends her soaring. Bristling at the limitations faced by a woman in rural Appalachia and fueled by the memory of her late Mama telling her to "live out there," Velva Jean hits the road to pursue her dream of singing at the Grand Ole Opry. But after a string of auditions, she begins...
Author
Series
Summary
At the end of a long high-profile trial, Atlanta prosecutor Mary Crow is going home to North Carolina, and taking her two closest friends with her. The autumn Appalachians are gorgeous, and the women are looking forward to a long weekend away from city life. But the mountains can be equally hazardous, with rugged climbs, impenetrable fogs and treacherous cliffs. Add to the hostile terrain two predators bent on Mary's destruction. Mitchell Whitman...
Author
Series
Ballad novels volume 5
Summary
One hundred years after a woman is hanged, the search for justice reveals a story of faith, obsession, and murder.
In 1832, 18-year-old Frankie Silver was charged with murdering her young husband. In 1833, she became the first woman in the state of North Carolina to be hanged for murder. But was she guilty? More than 100 years later, Tennessee sheriff Spencer Arrowood is determined to reveal the truth behind this unanswered question. A spellbinding...
Author
Series
Summary
Fever Devilin, born and raised amongst the hill country folk of the Georgia Appalachians, left home a long time ago and pursued an education, then a career, in the wider outside world. A folklorist by inclination and profession, he left the strange world of academia behind to return to his family-home in the if-anything-stranger mountain town he grew up in. But oddness follows Fever wherever he goes and Blue Mountain, Georgia is no different.
When...
17) December's thorn
Author
Series
Fever Devilin volume 7
Summary
Recovering from a near-death experience in his family home in the Georgia Appalachian Mountains, Fever Devilin finds his sanity questioned when he is approached by a woman from his past who claims to have had his baby, an encounter that precedes an attempt on his life.
18) A widow's curse
Author
Series
Summary
Hired to uncover the provenance of a mysterious medallion with a tie to the Georgia Appalachians where he lives and to his own secret family history, folklorist Fever Devilin is stunned when the owner of the medallion turns up dead in Fever's house.
Author
Summary
No one captures the complexities of Appalachia - a rugged, brutal landscape of exquisite beauty - as evocatively and indelibly as author and poet Ron Rash. Winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, two O Henry prizes, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, Rash brilliantly illuminates the tensions between the traditional and the modern, the old and new south, tenderness and violence, man and nature. Though the focus is regional,...
Author
Summary
This coming-of-age novel depicts the trials, triumphs, and tragedies that befall Maggie Martin, the eldest of eight children whose family struggles to make ends meet on a hilly farm in Campbell Hollow, a narrow mountain valley in East Tennessee. On the last day of eighth grade, Maggie begins to dream of finding a way to escape the drudgery and confinement of life in the hollow and establish her independence. Her plan begins to fall in place when she...