Download or read book Gap Creek written by Robert Morgan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller & Oprah's Book Club Pick Young Julie Harmon works “hard as a man,” they say, so hard that at times she’s not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better. But Julie and Hank’s new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what to fear most—the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap Creek a timeless story of a marriage.

Download or read book The Road from Gap Creek written by Robert Morgan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America’s most acclaimed writers returns to the land on which he has staked a literary claim to paint an indelible portrait of a family in a time of unprecedented change. In a compelling weaving of fact and fiction, Robert Morgan introduces a family’s captivating story, set during World War II and the Great Depression. Driven by the uncertainties of the future, the family struggles to define itself against the vivid Appalachian landscape. The Road from Gap Creek explores modern American history through the lives of an ordinary family persevering through extraordinary times.

Download or read book Gap Creek Oprah s Book Club written by Robert Morgan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller & Oprah's Book Club Pick Young Julie Harmon works “hard as a man,” they say, so hard that at times she’s not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better. But Julie and Hank’s new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what to fear most—the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap Creek a timeless story of a marriage.

Download or read book Chasing the North Star written by Robert Morgan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his latest historical novel, bestselling author Robert Morgan brings to full and vivid life the story of Jonah Williams, who, in 1850, on his eighteenth birthday, flees the South Carolina plantation on which he was born a slave. He takes with him only a few stolen coins, a knife, and the clothes on his back--no shoes, no map, no clear idea of where to head, except north, following a star that he prays will be his guide. Hiding during the day and running through the night, Jonah must elude the men sent to capture him and the bounty hunters out to claim the reward on his head. There is one person, however, who, once on his trail, never lets him fully out of sight: Angel, herself a slave, yet with a remarkably free spirit. In Jonah, she sees her own way to freedom, and so sets out to follow him. Bristling with breathtaking adventure, Chasing the North Star is deftly grounded in historical fact yet always gripping and poignant as the story follows Jonah and Angel through the close calls and narrow escapes of a fearsome world. It is a celebration of the power of the human spirit to persevere in the face of great adversity. And it is Robert Morgan at his considerable best.

Download or read book Get Up and Ride written by Jim Shea and published by Jim Shea. This book was released on 2020-12-11 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 2010, brothers-in-law Marty and Jim embark on a cycling trip along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal, a 335-mile trek from their home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Jim's boyhood home in Washington, DC. Chance encounters with colorful local characters and other surprising escapades during five days on the trail make for nonstop laughs. As they travel through forests and along winding rivers, they experience the breathtaking scenery of western Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia, exploring early American history while learning more about each other as well as themselves. This true story is for adventurers and cyclists as well as couch potatoes looking for a lighthearted take on friendship and some hilarious fun.

Download or read book Mountain Time written by Ivan Doig and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At fifty-something, environmental reporter Mitch Rozier has grown estranged from Seattle's coffee shop and cyber culture. His newspaper is going under, and his relationship with Lexa McCaskill is stalled at "just living together." Then, he is summoned by his sly, exasperating father, Lyle, back to the family land, which Lyle plans to sell in the latest of his get-rich schemes before dying. Lexa follows, accompanied by her sister Mariah, and the stage is set for long-overdue confrontations -- between lovers, sisters, and father and son. Mountain Time is distinguished by humor and a wry insight into the power of family feuds to mark individuals and endure. Set against the glorious backdrop of Montana mountain country, it is a dazzling novel of love, family, and the contemporary West.

Download or read book Brave Enemies written by Robert Morgan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disguising herself as a boy after killing her abusive stepfather, Josie Summers meets and marries the Reverend John Trethman, a young Methodist minister, but when her husband is kidnapped by British soldiers, Josie once again dons her male disguise to join the North Carolina militia and to find her husband. Reprint.

Download or read book Boone written by Robert Morgan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2008-09-23 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Daniel Boone is the story of America—its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny. Bestselling, critically acclaimed author Robert Morgan reveals the complex character of a frontiersman whose heroic life was far stranger and more fascinating than the myths that surround him. This rich, authoritative biography offers a wholly new perspective on a man who has been an American icon for more than two hundred years—a hero as important to American history as his more political contemporaries George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Extensive endnotes, cultural and historical background material, and maps and illustrations underscore the scope of this distinguished and immensely entertaining work.

Download or read book Lions of the West written by Robert Morgan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Thomas Jefferson’s birth in 1743 to the California Gold Rush in 1849, America’s westward expansion comes to life in the hands of a writer fascinated by the way individual lives link up, illuminate one another, and collectively impact history. Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the North American continent, from ocean to ocean. The account of how that dream became reality unfolds in the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their stories—and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thou- sands of Native Americans—form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War. Filled with illustrations, portraits, maps, battle plans, notes, and time lines, Lions of the West is a richly authoritative biography of America—its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny.

Download or read book This Rock written by Robert Morgan and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2001-09-28 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Gap Creek-an international best-seller and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award-comes the gripping story of two brothers struggling against each other and the confines of their mountain world in 1920s Appalachia. The Powell brothers-Muir and Moody-are as different as Cain and Abel. Muir is an innocent, a shy young man with big dreams. Moody, the older and wilder brother-embittered by the death of his father, by years of fighting his mother, and by his jealousy of Muir's place in the family-takes to moonshine and gambling and turns his anger on his brother. Muir escapes by wandering, making his way around the country in attempts to find something-an occupation, a calling-to match his ambition. Through it all, their mother, Ginny, tries to steer her boys right, all the while remembering her own losses: her husband (whose touch still haunts her), her youth, and the fiery sense of God that once ordered her world. When Muir, in a drunken vision, decides that his purpose in life is to clear a space on a hill and build a stone church with his own hands, the consequences of his plan are far-reaching and irrevocable: a community threatens to tear itself apart, men die, and his family is forever changed. All that's left in the aftermath are the ghosts and the memories of a new man.

Download or read book The Road written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity

Download or read book The Truest Pleasure written by Robert Morgan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 1998-01-09 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ginny, who marries Tom at the turn of the century after her family has given up on her ever marrying, narrates THE TRUEST PLEASURE--the story of their life together on her father's farm in the western North Carolina mountains. They have a lot in common--love of the land and fathers who fought in the Civil War. Tom's father died in the war, but Ginny's father came back to western North Carolina to hold on to the farm and turn a profit. Ginny's was a childhood of relative security, Tom's one of landlessness. Truth be known--and they both know it--their marriage is mutually beneficial in purely practical terms. Tom wants land to call his own. Ginny knows she can't manage her aging father's farm by herself. But there is also mutual attraction, and indeed their "loving" is deeply gratifying. What keeps getting in the way of it, though, are their obsessions. Tom Powell's obsession is easy to understand. He's a workaholic who hoards time and money. Ginny is obsessed by Pentecostal preaching. That she loses control of her dignity, that she speaks "in tongues," that she is "saved," seem to her a blessing and to Tom a disgrace. It's not until Tom lies unconscious and at the mercy of a disease for which the mountain doctor has no cure that Ginny realizes her truest pleasure is her love for her husband. Like COLD MOUNTAIN, the time and place of THE TRUEST PLEASURE are remote from contemporary American life, but its rendering of the nature of marriage is timeless and universal. Praise for THE TRUEST PLEASURE: "Marvelously vivid imagery. . . . a quietly audacious book."--The New York Times Book Review; "Morgan deeply understands these people and their world, and he writes about them with an authority usually associated with the great novelists of the last century. . . . the book is astonishing."--The Boston Book Review;

Download or read book Gods of Howl Mountain written by Taylor Brown and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted '40 Ford coupe. Between deliveries to roadhouses, brothels, and private clients, he lives with his formidable grandmother, evades federal agents, and stokes the wrath of a rival runner.

Download or read book Icy Sparks written by Gwyn Hyman Rubio and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-03-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book and the March 2001 selection of Oprah's Book Club® ! Icy Sparks is the sad, funny and transcendent tale of a young girl growing up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky during the 1950’s. Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s beautifully written first novel revolves around Icy Sparks, an unforgettable heroine in the tradition of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird or Will Treed in Cold Sassy Tree. At the age of ten, Icy, a bright, curious child orphaned as a baby but raised by adoring grandparents, begins to have strange experiences. Try as she might, her "secrets"—verbal croaks, groans, and physical spasms—keep afflicting her. As an adult, she will find out she has Tourette’s Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, but for years her behavior is the source of mystery, confusion, and deep humiliation. Narrated by a grown up Icy, the book chronicles a difficult, but ultimately hilarious and heartwarming journey, from her first spasms to her self-acceptance as a young woman. Curious about life beyond the hills, talented, and energetic, Icy learns to cut through all barriers—physical, mental, and spiritual—in order to find community and acceptance. Along her journey, Icy faces the jeers of her classmates as well as the malevolence of her often-ignorant teachers—including Mrs. Stilton, one of the most evil fourth grade teachers ever created by a writer. Called willful by her teachers and "Frog Child" by her schoolmates, she is exiled from the schoolroom and sent to a children’s asylum where it is hoped that the roots of her mysterious behavior can be discovered. Here Icy learns about difference—her own and those who are even more scarred than she. Yet, it isn’t until Icy returns home that she really begins to flower, especially through her friendship with the eccentric and obese Miss Emily, who knows first-hand how it feels to be an outcast in this tightly knit Appalachian community. Under Miss Emily’s tutelage, Icy learns about life’s struggles and rewards, survives her first comical and heartbreaking misadventure with romance, discovers the healing power of her voice when she sings, and ultimately—takes her first steps back into the world. Gwyn Hyman Rubio’s Icy Sparks is a fresh, original, and completely redeeming novel about learning to overcome others’ ignorance and celebrate the differences that make each of us unique.

Download or read book The Green Age of Asher Witherow written by M. Allen Cunningham and published by Unbridled Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel tells the story of a young soul coming of age during the boom and bust years of a California Welsh coal mining in the 1860-70s.

Download or read book Perfect Song written by Lauren Runow and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I came back to Mason Creek when my life was turned upside down, both literally and figuratively. Scared and alone, I packed my belongings and left New York where I've made a career as a writer for a national publication to stay with my parents in the town so different than the big apple they might as well be on different planets.Getting to see my friends was a big plus, but meeting someone new never crossed my mind until a ruggedly handsome man in jeans and a worn baseball cap came over to say hello. Not knowing someone in this small town is like not knowing how to breathe. The slightly older man caught my eye, just as much as I caught his. A witty and roguish personality kept me on my toes, even if falling for someone new is the last thing I need. Neither of us wants a relationship, yet we keep finding each other in this small town. Rumors fly, hearts connect, and there's more at stake than either of us are willing to share. This man has secrets everyone wants to know, but when more than he's willing to share is revealed I hope I'm strong enough to help him. I may have come back to town to save myself, but saving him might be the real reason I'm here.

Download or read book If the Creek Don t Rise written by Leah Weiss and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An immersive and deeply emotional reading experience—especially satisfying for readers who love richly drawn characters and a strong sense of place" —NPR He's gonna be sorry he ever messed with me and Loretta Lynn. Sadie Blue has been a wife for fifteen days. That's long enough to know she should have never hitched herself to Roy Tupkin, even with the baby. Sadie is desperate to make her own mark on the world, but in remote Appalachia, a ticket out of town is hard to come by and hope often gets stomped out. When a stranger sweeps into Baines Creek and knocks things off kilter, Sadie finds herself with an unexpected lifeline...if she can just figure out how to use it. Fans of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek will love this intimate insight into a fiercely proud, tenacious community and relish the voices of the forgotten folks of Baines Creek. With a colorful cast of characters and a flair for the Southern Gothic, If the Creek Don't Rise is a debut novel bursting with heart, honesty, and homegrown grit. "Like all great southern writers, Leah Weiss's magic turns the local into the universal." —Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author, on All The Little Hopes