Orem Library

Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.

When Kate and her husband and baby son move to her grandmother's Missouri farm in an effort to influence the grandmother to move to a nursing home, Kate is helped by the discovery of her grandmother's journal.

Winner of the 1933 Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, COLD COMFORT FARM is a wickedly funny portrait of British rural life in the 1930s. Flora Poste, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, and becomes enmeshed in a web of violent emotions, despair, and scheming, until Flora manages to set things right.

"The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop." Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired...

Account of a boy's growing up in a large and impoverished family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

It is December, and there are many things for the family to do around the farm to get it ready for winter.

Dirt-poor, sensitive as poets, and proud as kings, the Powell family has lived on a Georgia mountaintop for generations. Then, during the 1960s, young Ursula Powell's father convinces the Tiber family, owners of everything in nearby Tiberville, to commission a huge iron sculpture of a bear for the town. Decades later the strange sculpture --- rejected by the townspeople and left to rust on the Powell farm --- symbolizes a family's failure and thwarted...

In a tight-knit, rural Black Texan community of Jerusalem, the Turner clan comes toether as the family says good-bye to their matriarch on her deathbed. The family's "reunion" unearths long-kept secrets: Julie regrets her wasted youth and the time spent under Helen Jean's thumb; police offier Alex grapples with a dark and twisted past; Jan yearns to go leave her children--and Jerusalem-- behind for good; Lydia's marriage is falling apart because her...

Emilienne's life is Paradise, her isolated farm at the end of a winding path. After the sudden death of her daughter and son-in-law, this is where she farms alone, with her courage and her land as her only resources, along with her two little grandchildren: Blanche and Gabriel. As seasons pass, Blanche grows older and develops an even stronger connection to her home and the generations of women who have guarded it, like her mother and grandmother...

Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch perfect, you know from the opening page that this is the real thinga literary experience in which to lose yourself, by an author of immense talent. Here is a gorgeous, slow-burning story set in the rural "badlands" of northern Ontario, where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the landscape. For the farming Pye family, life is a Greek tragedy where the...