Shae is a poignant coming-of-age story by Mesha Maren, one of the most exciting young queer writers on the literary landscape. This novel invites readers into the life of Shae, a teenager living in a rural small town in West Virginia. Shae's world is turned upside down when she falls in love with Cam, who is on the cusp of an important personal transformation.

When Shae, at the tender age of sixteen, meets Cam, the slightly older new kid in town, she believes she has discovered the ideal companion she's always desired. Their bond quickly escalates from friendship to something more. However, their relationship takes an unexpected turn when Shae becomes pregnant and Cam begins to transition, embracing female pronouns and experimenting with clothes that no longer fit Shae.

Amidst this personal upheaval, Shae faces another challenge - a struggle with opioid addiction following a traumatic C-section and the birth of their daughter, Eva. The story provides a stark look at the opioid crisis, particularly how it affects rural communities like theirs in West Virginia. As Shae grapples with her dependence, Cam continues her journey of self-discovery, confronting the harsh realities of being a trans woman in rural America.

Shae is a deeply emotional exploration of two young women's lives and the place they cherish, despite its flaws. This novel is a testament to Mesha Maren's storytelling prowess, following her acclaimed works Sugar Run and Perpetual West.

A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three daughters. The youngest, beautiful and inscrutable Rose Thorn, has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild.

Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood.

With a “ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world” (New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.

Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. It is an unflinching look at the surprising consequences of even our most well-intended actions, and an enthralling consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster has created an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira, Birnam Wood’s founder, stumbles on an answer: occupying the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. The enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira and Birnam Wood, he makes them an offer that would set them up for the long term. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?

The Growing Season tells the inspiring story of how a scrappy rural childhood gave Frey the grit and resiliency to take risks that paid off in unexpected ways. Rather than leaving her community, she found adventure and opportunity in one of the most forgotten parts of our country. With fearlessness and creativity, she literally dug her destiny out of the dirt.

One tenacious woman's journey to escape rural poverty and create a billion-dollar farming business--without ever leaving the land she loves.

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find—her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Noemí is also an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: Not of her cousin's new husband, who is both menacing and alluring; not of his father, the ancient patriarch who seems to be fascinated by Noemí; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemí's dreams with visions of blood and doom.

Her only ally in this inhospitable abode is the family's youngest son. Shy and gentle, he seems to want to help Noemí, but might also be hiding dark knowledge of his family's past. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place. The family's once colossal wealth and faded mining empire kept them from prying eyes, but as Noemí digs deeper she unearths stories of violence and madness.

And Noemí, mesmerized by the terrifying yet seductive world of High Place, may soon find it impossible to ever leave this enigmatic house behind.

Far From the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy's first major literary success. Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy, and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening the stability of the whole community.

One of his first works set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex, Hardy's novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with his evocative descriptions of rural life and landscapes, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships. This edition, based on Hardy's original 1874 manuscript, is the complete novel he never saw published, and restores its full candor and innovation. Rosemarie Morgan's introduction discusses the history of its publication, as well as the biblical and classical allusions that permeate the novel.

Cold Comfort Farm is a wickedly funny portrait of British rural life in the 1930s. Flora Poste, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, and becomes enmeshed in a web of violent emotions, despair, and scheming, until Flora manages to set things right.

Bob Dollar, a young man from Denver, embarks on a journey to the prairies of Texas and Oklahoma, tasked with scouting locations for hog farms for Global Pork Rind. However, this mission leads him to uncover not just potential sites, but the rich history and vibrant people of the area.

Settling into LaVon Fronk's bunkhouse and lending a hand at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, Bob is confronted with the resilient and quirky inhabitants of Woolybucket. These are folks who have weathered tornadoes, dust storms, and economic shifts, holding steadfast to their land and legacy.

Robust, often bawdy, and strikingly original, this novel tracks the waves of change that have shaped the American landscape, capturing the essence of a community's struggle to maintain its identity in the face of modernization.

One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout his fiction: the diabolical role of chance in determining the course of a life. As Alexander Theroux asserts in his Introduction, Hardy was committed to the deep expression of [nature's] ironic chaos and strange apathy, even hostility, toward man.

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.

From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly feuding neighbors tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the possibilities of a future neither of them expected.

Over the course of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place. Prodigal Summer demonstrates a balance of narrative, drama and ideas that is characteristic of Barbara Kingsolver's finest work.

"I’ve not always been what I am now"

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled ‘A Story of a Man of Character’, Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.

The Bridges of Madison County tells 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 dream. This novel gives voice to the longings of men and women everywhere-and shows us what it is to love and be loved so intensely that life is never the same again.

Pet Sematary is a gripping tale of horror where the boundary between life and death is blurred. When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, everything seems perfect: a physician father, a beautiful wife, a charming little daughter, and an adorable infant son, all complemented by an idyllic home. The friendly cat adds to the family's happiness, but the nearby woods harbor a chilling secret.

Behind the children's pet cemetery lies another graveyard, one from which the dead return. The Creeds are about to discover that sometimes, dead is indeed better, as they are drawn into a sinister world where the line between the living and the dead is frighteningly thin.

Cien años de soledad es una obra clave en la literatura hispanoamericana, una magnífica creación del escritor colombiano Gabriel Garcíaa Márquez. Reconocida como una de las más importantes novelas del siglo XX, esta obra se considera un pilar del realismo mágico, un estilo literario que mezcla lo maravilloso con la realidad.

La novela se centra en la historia de la familia Buendía a lo largo de siete generaciones, en el pueblo ficticio de Macondo. Este relato épico abarca diversos temas como el amor, la muerte, la soledad, la riqueza, la guerra y la paz, creando un universo literario donde lo cotidiano y lo fantástico se entrelazan de manera natural y poética.

Con su poderosa narrativa y su rica imaginación, Gabriel García Márquez teje una historia que no solo cuenta la vida de los personajes, sino que también refleja la historia y el espíritu de toda una época y cultura.

Mary Turner is a self-confident, independent young woman who becomes the depressed, frustrated wife of an ineffectual, unsuccessful farmer. Little by little the ennui of years on the farm work their slow poison, and Mary's despair progresses until the fateful arrival of an enigmatic and virile black servant, Moses. Locked in anguish, Mary and Moses -- master and slave -- are trapped in a web of mounting attraction and repulsion. Their psychic tension explodes in an electrifying scene that ends this disturbing tale of racial strife in colonial South Africa.

The Grass Is Singing blends Lessing's imaginative vision with her own vividly remembered early childhood to recreate the quiet horror of a woman's struggle against a ruthless fate.

Louisa May Alcott's classic tale of four sisters.

Grown-up Meg, tomboyish Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. The four March sisters couldn't be more different. But with their father away at war, and their mother working to support the family, they have to rely on one another. Whether they're putting on a play, forming a secret society, or celebrating Christmas, there's one thing they can't help wondering: Will Father return home safely?

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

Sarmiento, proscrito por la tiranía rosista y exiliado por dos veces en Chile, fue periodista brillante, político y polemista literario. "Facundo" es una biografía concebida como historia, historia de las guerras civiles de su patria centradas en la figura de Juan Facundo Quiroga, el más famoso, cruel, violento y despiadado caudillo de las guerras civiles argentinas. El desarrollo de los acontecimientos impulsó a Sarmiento a unir el tema biográfico a la realidad presente, denunciando a su enemigo Rosas.