Rural Small Town Fiction

Forty-four-year-old Alice Holtzman is stuck in a dead-end job, bereft of family, and now reeling from the unexpected death of her husband. Alice has begun having panic attacks whenever she thinks about how her life hasn't turned out the way she dreamed. Even the beloved honeybees she raises in her spare time aren't helping her feel better these days.

When Remy's grandmother dies, it means leaving her life in San Francisco and returning to a town she swore she'd never revisit, forced to confront a world she'd worked hard to put behind her over the last twelve years. She's not expecting that the first girl to ever steal her heart, the pretty, popular Fallon Lewis, is still around, and in a town this small, their paths continue to cross, much to Remy's dismay. It's hard enough seeing her first love, but it's exponentially more difficult when she can barely stand to look at the woman.

When a young family moves into an unfinished development community, cracks begin to emerge in both their new residence and their lives, as a mysterious online DIY instructor delivers dark subliminal suggestions about how to handle any problem around the house. The trials of home improvement, destructive insecurities, and haunted house horror all collide in this thrilling story perfect for fans of Nick Cutter’s bestsellers The Troop and The Deep.

It’s 1985. Rachel O’Brien arrives in Little Cove seeking a fresh start after her father dies and her relationship ends. As a new teacher at the local Catholic high school, Rachel chafes against the small community, where everyone seems to know her business. The anonymous notes that keep appearing on her car, telling her to go home, don’t make her feel welcome either. Still, Rachel is quickly drawn into the island’s distinctive music and culture, as well as the lives of her students and fellow teacher Doug Bishop.

When experienced homicide detective Casey Duncan first moved to the secret town of Rockton, she expected a safe haven for people like her, people running from their past misdeeds and past lives. She knew living in Rockton meant living off the grid completely: no cell phones, no Internet, no mail, very little electricity, and no way of getting in or out without the town council's approval. What she didn't expect is that Rockton comes with its own set of secrets and dangers.

In the seaside town of Kinlough, on Ireland’s west coast, three old friends are thrown together for the first time in years. They—Helen, Joe, and Mush—were part of an original group of six inseparable teenagers in the summer of 2003, with motherless, reckless Kala Lanann as their group’s white-hot center. Soon after that summer’s peak, Kala disappeared without a trace. Now it’s fifteen years later.

Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she has been writing for six years. At 31, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life.

A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy’s mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others.

The biggest mistake of Jaye Colfax’s life was letting Velvet Spencer leave. For three years, they were together exclusively and it was great—at least for Jaye. But Velvet wanted more. Jaye wouldn’t commit to anything because he just didn’t believe in love or marriage. Tired of waiting, Velvet left him without so much as a goodbye. Only then did Jaye realize he’d been too proud to admit he loved her. But it was too late—his stubbornness had cost him the love of his life.

In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on 44 acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago.

Maggie is 36, recently divorced and embarrassingly unemployed. With a bank account nearing zero, she does the only thing she can think of: make a business proposition to her gorgeous and successful estranged mother. To Maggie’s utter surprise, her mother agrees. Any funds she can create off the sale of the dilapidated family inn on the island of Magnolia would be hers to invest.

Minnesota, 1977. For the teens of one close-knit community, summer means late-night swimming parties at the quarry, the county fair, and venturing into the tunnels beneath the city. But for two best friends, it’s not all fun and games. Heather and Brenda have a secret. Something they saw in the dark. Something they can’t forget. They’ve decided to never tell a soul. But their vow is tested when their friend disappears—the second girl to vanish in a week. And yet the authorities are reluctant to investigate.

This complete collection includes all of the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are 41 stories in all, including those in the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.

Flann O'Brien's most popular and surrealistic novel concerns an imaginary, hellish village police force and a local murder.

Weird, satirical, and very funny, its popularity has suddenly increased with the mention of the novel in the TV series Lost.

My high school sweetheart, the boy who shattered my heart, is back in our small town, and there will be no avoiding him for the next two weeks. Only there is nothing boyish about Miguel Fernandez. The NFL's best rookie defensive end is even more wickedly handsome than he was four years ago—tall, with abs for days, all that unruly hair, and eyes so dark they swallow you whole. And that's exactly what he's doing every time our paths cross.

In 1916, Sven Ormson leaves a restless life in Stockholm to seek adventure in Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where darkness reigns four months of the year and he might witness the splendor of the Northern Lights one night and be attacked by a polar bear the next. But his time as a miner ends when an avalanche nearly kills him, leaving him disfigured, and Sven flees even further, to an uninhabited fjord. There, with the company of a loyal dog, he builds a hut and lives alone, testing himself against the elements.

RITA Award winner Jodi Thomas continues her Whispering Mountain series with this second installment. Horse breeder Tobin McMurray doesn’t venture too far from his homestead. But when a Texas senator offers Tobin handsome compensation to deliver a horse to his daughter and teach her how to ride, he grudgingly agrees. Soon Tobin finds himself falling in love with the beautiful woman—but their budding romance is headed straight for danger.

New York Times and USA Today best-selling author Jodi Thomas won the coveted Romance Pioneer Award and a 2011 Reviewers’ Choice Award for Texas Blue. Lewton Paterson is a gambling man hoping to put his rough-and-tumble past behind him and marry into a quiet, respectable family. Arriving in Whispering Mountain, Lewt sets his sights on one of the McMurray sisters. But it doesn’t take long for Lewt to realize that gambling on love is his riskiest proposition yet.

Sisters Abby and Dusti Delaney have spent their entire lives on Rainbow Lane, but they dream of something bigger. So when a poker tournament comes to town, Dusti is determined to win enough money to leave. Enlisting expert Kieron O’Brian to teach her the game, sparks begin to fly as they play their hands. But Kieron refuses to stand in the way of her dream, even if it means losing her forever.… After a year of traveling, Ronny Logan is settling into a home on Rainbow Lane, but that’s all the settling she’ll be doing. Ronny refuses to fall for anyone, regardless of the chemistry she has with her neighbor Austin Hawk.

When Kate Bowman temporarily moves to her grandmother’s Missouri farm with her husband and baby son, she learns that the lessons that most enrich our lives often come unexpectedly. The family has given Kate the job of convincing Grandma Rose, who's become increasingly stubborn and forgetful, to move off her beloved land and into a nursing home. But Kate knows such a change would break her grandmother’s heart.