Depression Era Fiction

Birdie Jennings dreams of a big life beyond her small town of Mt. Sterling, Kentucky—beyond her mundane job tying tobacco leaves at Wrights Factory, beyond her position as the baby of the family. Her life changes when she meets smooth-talking Jimmy Walker. Jimmy makes big promises for an exciting life together, and Birdie is quickly swept off her feet. But some short years after they marry, Jimmy disappears without a trace, leaving Birdie hurt and alone with their two toddlers. Out of money and out of options, Birdie moves back home with her overbearing mother.

A veteran of the Great War, Jesse Cole is grateful for the quiet life he now leads. But when his closest friend runs afoul of local criminals Frog and Squirrel Fenley, Jesse is forced to spin his moral compass and enter a violent and volatile underworld. There he encounters corrupt lawmen, hired assassins, and a dark family secret that will upend all he once knew. Complicating matters are Texas Ranger Amon Atkins—who arrives to investigate the Fenleys just as their empire is threatened by a deadly new competitor—and the green-eyed, raven-haired Adaline, a love Jesse thought he’d lost forever.

With mysterious serial murders putting peaceful Lexington, Alabama, on edge, Jessie and Hubert Wiggins’ steadfast calm and devotion to each other reassures everyone that faith will see them through. But Jessie and Hubert have paid a terrible hidden cost to maintain their devout facade and respectable standing. Nothing can allay the guilt they feel—or stop the growing distrust between them.

Since childhood, identical twins Leona and Fiona Dunbar have been getting in—and out—of trouble by pretending to be each other. Yet underneath, they couldn’t be more different. Outspoken Leona lives to break rules, have a good time, and scandalize their respectable hometown of Lexington. Fiona is a seemingly demure churchgoing girl who is the apple of her domineering, widowed mother Mavis’s eye. But together, the twins have fooled teachers, boyfriends, bosses, racist police—and most importantly, straitlaced Mavis.

Aaron Platt has spent every day of his life breaking his back to scrape a living from the rocky, played-out fields of the Adirondack farm he inherited from his sadistic father. One winter morning, he follows footprints in the snow to his barn and discovers a man freezing to death in a horse stall. What unfolds between the two men, past and present, is a brisk, gritty depiction of crime and punishment. But their harrowing story is more than that, exposing the shocking hypocrisy of the people who live in the nearby bucolic town.

Babe is a charismatic and widely loved man, a gambler with a gift for gab that often gets him out of tricky situations. He’s also a dreamer, something he shares with his patient and loving wife, Rosie. They both yearn for financial stability and see the land they own as insurance for future generations. But when Babe and a few comrades enlist in a scheme that improbably falls apart, he endangers the little security the family has. On the verge of losing everything, what’s a family man to do? If you’re a gambler like Babe, you double down and risk it all for one big score.

An urgent note from a friend spurs Ann Gay to visit her recently married cousin, Jacqueline Heaton. Upon her arrival at Fiddler's Fingers, a remote, pine-grown estate on Lake Superior, Ann immediately senses her cousin's fear - someone has been playing increasingly malicious tricks on the Heatons, a proud family of Minnesota lumber tycoons, and all signs point to Jacqueline as the instigator. Ann quickly resolves to take Jacqueline and her young daughter, Toby, away from the danger. But what began as seemingly trivial pranks escalates to direct attacks and ultimately murder.

When the skies dried up, Gloria thought it was temporary. When the dust storms rolled in, she thought they would pass. But now the bank man’s come to take the family farm, and Pa’s decided to up and move to California in search of work. They’ll pick fruit, he says, until they can save up enough money to buy land of their own again.

It's a boring, hardscrabble life for three sisters growing up on a Michigan farm in the throes of the Great Depression. But when young Nellie, digging for pirate treasure, discovers the tiny blue-black hand of a dead baby, rumors begin to fly. Narrated by Nellie and her two older sisters, the story follows the girls as they encounter a patchwork of threatening circumstances and take it upon themselves to solve the mystery.

When Works Progress Administration editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work. Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state’s powerful Copper Kings who don’t want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.

After twenty years in a loveless marriage, Evelyn Henderson will do anything to escape her stifling suburban life. She boards a train for Reno, Nevada, a former frontier town that’s booming thanks to “six-weekers”: women from all walks of life who take up residence there just long enough to secure an uncontested divorce—a right they don’t yet have in their home states.

Amanda Lawrence, a charming, sheltered New York socialite, falls in love with Jonathan Dartland, a part-Apache mining engineer who belongs to the vastness of the Arizona desert. Amanda responds to his strength and self-reliance, but has nothing and nobody to guide her when she follows him to the grim town of Lodestone.

This highly anticipated sequel to Delaney's People takes listeners on a turbulent, surprise-filled journey from Depression-era rural Alabama through 2011's devastating tornadoes and their impact on Delaney's family and friends. Family ties, love, loss, betrayal and a characteristic dead mule combine in a perfect book for devotees of Southern literature.