Wildlife biologist Deanna is caught off guard by an intrusive young hunter, while bookish city wife Lusa finds herself facing a difficult identity choice, and elderly neighbors find attraction at the height of a long-standing feud.

Reaching her sixteenth year in the harsh Ozarks while caring for her poverty-stricken family, Ree Dolly learns that they will lose their house unless her bail-skipping father can be found and made to appear at an upcoming court date.

The train taking nineteen-year-old teacher Christy Huddleston from her home in Asheville, North Carolina, might as well be transporting her to another world. The Smoky Mountain community of Cutter Gap feels suspended in time, trapped by poverty, superstitions, and century-old traditions. But as Christy struggles to find acceptance in her new home, some see her - and her one-room school - as a threat to their way of life. Her faith is challenged and...

"Eight years have passed since Ave Maria Mulligan married Jack Mac, moved up into the hills, and dug in her roots even deeper. But Ave Maria soon discovers that the mountains cannot shelter her from the painful lessons of the heart. As her life reaches a crossroads, almost everybody in town has advice to offer--including the Bookmobile's self-appointed sexpert Iva Lou Wade, savvy pharmacy owner Pearl Grimes ('a very mature twenty-four'), crusty chain-smoking...

A routine prisoner transfer on a rural highway ends with the bus upside-down in a ravine, the driver dead of a heart attack, and convicted murderer Ernie Luntz on the loose, his eyes fixed on the mountain range in the distance, over which lies his hometown of Ash Falls. Set in a moss-draped, Pacific Northwest mountain town, Ash Falls is the story of a closely connected community both held together and torn apart by one man's single act of horrific...

Reminiscences of the pleasures of life in the mountains as a child.

Disguising herself as a boy to join the Union army alongside her husband, Malinda Blalock raids the farms of Confederate sympathizers and promotes the efforts of governor Zebulon Vance, who would protect Appalachian interests.

"D and Spider have always been close friends, and they are further united in their shared heartbreak: they both lost siblings in a horrific plane crash two years earlier. A chance sighting of a beloved cuddly toy in a photograph of the only survivor spurs D to finally seek closure. She and Spider and their friend, Min, set off on a road trip to the mountainside site of that terrible crash. Ariel has lived on the mountain all her life. She and her...

His country burning with war, his family shattered, a young man strikes off on his own and builds a legend with his fists, a pistol, knife, and long gun. This collection includes the classic westerns Trail of the Mountain Man and Return of the Mountain Man, long unavailable and here together for the first time in one action-packed volume . . . When the Missouri farm boy named Jensen came west, he started fighting, surviving, and learning every brutal...

In 1937 rural Kentucky, Cora Mae starts a school newspaper to rally support for the Rural Electrification Act, but the town's resistance to change is not easy to overcome.