Akron Public Library

One of Ours is a novel by Willa Cather, first published in 1922. The novel won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. One of Ours tells the story of the life of Claude Wheeler, a Nebraska native around the turn of the 20th century. The son of a successful farmer and an intensely pious mother, he is guaranteed a comfortable livelihood. Nevertheless, Wheeler views himself as a victim of his father's success and his own inexplicable malaise. The novel...

"Despite having little in common, Eddie [Enidina] and Mary need one another for survival and companionship. But as the Great Depression threatens, the delicate balance of their reliance on one another tips, pitting neighbor against neighbor, exposing the dark secrets they hide from one another, and triggering a series of disquieting events that threaten to unravel not only their friendship but their families as well."--from flap on front cover.

The story of a Wisconsin farm that sings with the happiness and contentment of a small girl whose roots are sinking deep into the soil of a loved place.

In the winter of 1919, a young mother named Mathilda Neumann drowns beneath the ice of a rural Wisconsin lake. The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened...

John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother along to a new zest for life. Years of privation are rewarded on the farm. But when Alexandra falls in love with Carl Linstrum, and her family objects because he is poor, he leaves to seek a different career. After Alexandra's younger...

A rollicking panarama of Chicago's high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges.

Sadie Fisher wonders if she'll ever find true love again after the death of her husband. When wealthy Englischer Kade Saunders rents her guest cottage for a month, Sadie's world is turned upside-down. Kade has a five-year old autistic son who is unexpectedly left in his permanent care. As Sadie's feelings for the child grow, so do her feelings for Kade. But is this man suitable for anything more than friendship?

In a future where the Population Police enforce the law limiting a family to only two children, Luke has lived all his twelve years in isolation and fear on his family's farm, until another "third" convinces him that the government is wrong.

The shaky marriage between Henry McAllan and his city-bred wife Laura becomes even more unstable when his brother Jamie returns from World War II in 1946 to help work the family's miserable cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, along with his comrade-in-arms Ronsel Jackson, the oldest son of local sharecroppers, who soon learns that his heroics in battle mean nothing in the Jim Crow south.

Ten-year-old Birdie Boyer can hardly wait to start picking strawberries. But her family has just moved to the Florida backwoods, and they haven't even begun their planting. Making the new farm prosper is not easy. There is the heat to suffer through, and droughts, and cold snaps. And, perhaps most worrisome of all for the Boyers, there are rowdy neighbors, just itching to start a feud.