Orem Library

The author of the highly praised Buster Midnight's Cafe returns with a magical new novel about the ties that bind women together through good and bad. It is the 1930s, and hard times have hit Harveyville, Kansas, where the crops are burning up and there's not a job to be found. For Queenie Bean, a young farmwife, the highlight of each week is the gathering of the Persian Pickle Club (named after a favorite cloth pattern), a group of local ladies dedicated...

Managing a Depression-era garage in Oklahoma while his friend recovers from an animal bite, Yates finds himself falling in love with his friend's babysitter and housekeeper, who has scandalized the town by living with her employer.

In Oklahoma, 1938, though scarcity and hardship have taken their toll on the spirit of the nation, one young woman still dares to dream. Kathleen Dolan has high hopes for investment in a newspaper, but then trouble strikes.

Augie March is a Jewish-American boy growing up fatherless and poor in Depression-era Chicago. He seeks a "special destiny," although his circumstances seem to position him for a uniquely disappointing life: his family consists of a simple-minded mother, a brother and "grandmother" who prove to be Machiavellian in their intentions, and an "idiot" youngest brother, Georgie.

Like her first two award-winning novels (Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), A Cure for Dreams is set in the rural and small-town South and draws richly upon the author's ear for comic turns of phrase and her sure grasp of the humor, pathos, and dignity of supposedly "ordinary" people. The determination of the women of the story to assert themselves in confining, dependent situations makes for uplifting, enjoyable reading.

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski's ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world...

So begins The Well and the Mine, a magnificent debut novel set in 1930s Alabama. The place is Carbon Hill, a small coal-mining community, in the midst of the Depression. The Moore family, a loving brood of five, is better off than most, generous to their less fortunate neighbors. But darkness arrives at their doorstep when a mysterious woman throws a baby down the Moores' well, and the story slowly unfolds, through the alternating voices of nine-year-old...

Steinbecks Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joadsdriven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic...