Akron Public Library

A strange iron sculpture of a bear brings together New Yorker Quentin Ricconni and Southerner Ursula Powell.

Set in the wild terrain of northern Ontario of the Pye and Morrison families who are rural farmers, this is a story of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harbored and driven underground.

In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Population: 485 gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country. Living in a ramshackle Wisconsin farmhouse-faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home-Michael Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood for clues to how to proceed...

The Bowers are not your typical, late-nineteenth-century homesteading family. They did not move west to farm Nebraska; they moved east. Matthew Bowers won't be working the land; his wife Lissa will--despite her diminutive size. Papa is dreaming of new ideas and Mama is farming, it will be 17-year-old Jolie who runs the household.

Since her mother's death, lovely Julie Jones has cared for her farmer father and five siblings. She dotes on her family, but she also dreams of the day a worthy love will come and whisk her away. When Evan Johnson, the son of the Joneses' despised neighbor, Walter, comes home to take over his father's farm, he proves a pleasant surprise. The handsome young WWI vet has a college education, and is nothing like his drunken, abusive father. Julie worries...

When Clay Spencer is late arriving home on Christmas Eve, the oldest of his eight children becomes involved in unexpected, often dangerous adventures while searching for him.

Set on a Depression Christmas Eve in 1933, this heart-tugging story centers around the Waltons, a rural family, as they prepare to celebrate Christmas together.

When a boy is killed by a breakaway rail car, Jolie bowers's compulsion to control is stretched to the limit.

"In his brilliant new novel, Perumal Murugan paints a bucolic yet menacing portrait of the rural lives of India's farming community through the story of a helpless young animal lost in a world it naively misunderstands. A farmer in Tamil Nadu is watching the sun set over his village one evening when a mysterious stranger, a giant man, appears on the horizon. He offers the farmer a black goat kid who is the runt of the litter, surely too frail to survive....

The death of Caro Meredith turns the lives of her grieving husband, in-laws, brother-in-law, and stepdaughter upside down as they all struggle to cope with the loss of a woman who had been the central figure in all their lives.