Convinced that he is cursed after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, 20-year-old Robert Chatham, who, constantly followed by trouble, has lost his will to live, finally shakes his demons until he is forced to make an impossible choice.

"On a Mississippi morning in 1859, Emily Matthews begs her father to save a slave, Nathan, about to be auctioned away from his family. Judge Matthews is an abolitionist who runs an illegal school for his slaves, hoping to eventually set them free. One, a woman named Ginny, has become Emily's companion and often her conscience - and understands all too well the hazards an educated slave must face. Yet even Ginny could not predict the tangled, tragic...

In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, Diane English Stiftel, her brother Floyd, and her parents are throwing a barbecue to celebrate her son's engagement. On this gorgeous, magical night, the bride's father, Alejandro Cambria, a wealthy power broker and one of Chicago's celebrated elite, discovers the limits and possibilities of cell phone range. Meanwhile, mother of the bride, Susan Kennedy Cambria, who dabbles in public relations and believes herself...

A black man's entanglement with a white family leads to trouble in this historical novel set in Depression Era Mississippi. To everyone in the small town of Linville, Mississippi, Jubal Jefferson is known simply as Dummy. A large black man who almost never speaks, he is forever pulling his mother's laundry wagon around town. Little else is known about him-apart from the fact that his father disappeared after the flood of 1927. For as long as...

A lively girl from a fiddle playing family marries a preacher's boy named Moses. Tragedy stalks them for generations to come. By the time they gather at the Opryland Hotel to cut an album, they have come full circle to the traditional tunes.

An essential collection of classic stories that established Flannery O'Connor's reputation as an American master of fiction-now with a new introduction by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Groff In 1955, with the title story and others in this critical edition, Flannery O'Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous...

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...

With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types...

For years Myra Rutledge and Annie de Silva, founding members of the Sisterhood, have funded an underground network run by former Supreme Court Justice Pearl Barnes to help women escape abusive relationships. When two of Pearl's clients fail to report for their weekly check-in, the Sisterhood and their allies begin a search for French model Amalie Laurent and her one-time maid, Rosalee Muno. Amalie's estranged husband, Lincoln Moss, is a distant cousin...

A fictionalized account of the life of Minna, kidnapped as a girl in Africa, as she endures the harsh life of a slave on a Southern plantation in the 1800s and tries to help her family survive.