Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all...

From the Back Cover: When orphaned, ten-year-old Jim Burden arrives in Nebraska to live on his grandparents' farm, he doesn't know what to expect. The Great Plains are so vast that he feels overwhelmed-marooned-blotted out. And what should he make of his new neighbors, the Shimerdas? They don't speak English, and their ways are foreign to him. Yet their fourteen-year-old daughter, Antonia, is pretty, high-spirited-and eager for Jim to teach her English....

Eustacia Vye longs to escape from Egdon Heath, but the man she chooses to save her longs to stay. Out of their struggle, the unfulfilled passion of his heroine, and the daily rhythms of late-nineteenth-century rural life, Hardy builds a drama fully worthy of the magnificent stage on which he places it. The Return of the Native is dominated by the brooding presence of Egdon Heath, located in Thomas Hardy’s imaginary Wessex, and in no other book...

Recent medical school graduate, Barry Laverty is delighted by the opportunity to join a small rural practice in the beautiful hills of Ballybucklebo, Northern Ireland, until he meets his superior, Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, a cantankerous older physician who has his own way of doing things.

Delighted to be offered a permanent position with crusty Dr. O'Reilly, Dr. Barry Laverty confronts a crisis when his reputation is threatened by the unexpected death of one of his patients.

After twelve years of wrestling with the conflicts of retirement, Father Tim Kavanagh realizes he doesn't need a steady job to prove himself. Then he's given one. As for what it proves, heaven only knows. It's life as usual in Mitford. A beloved town character lands a front-page obituary, but who was it, exactly, who died? And what about the former mayor, born the year Lindbergh landed in Paris, who is still running for office? All this, of course,...

Presents the story of the early life of Kinky Kincaid, once known as Maureen O'Hanlon, a farmer's daughter growing up in the hills and glens of 1920s County Cork, Ireland, who had a gift for seeing faries, spirits, and the dreaded banshee.

Set in a small English town during the 19th century, Cranford depicts the lives of women, centering on the elderly, the widowed, and the unmarried. The social expectations and customs of Cranford are mostly enforced by three older women. Rowena Fowler is a wealthy woman who takes pride in her luxury items and has outlived all of her kin. Betsy Barker is a sweet, but a bit odd lady, who has a pet cow that she loves so dearly that she sews pajamas for...

Disappointed to learn that his sweetheart will not be joining him for a first holiday season in a rural Northern Irish community, doctor Barry Laverty keeps himself busy by caring for his patients and struggling to outmaneuver a newly arrived quack physician.

If you've ever experienced the one true love of your life, a love that for some reason could never be, you will understand why readers all over the world were so moved by this small, unknown first novel that they made it a publishing phenomenon and #1 bestseller. The story of Robert Kincaid, the photographer and free spirit searching for the covered bridges of Madison County, and Francesca Johnson, the farm wife waiting for the fulfillment of a girlhood...