Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africas history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Patons impassioned novel about a black mans country under white mans law is a work of searing beauty. Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through...

This is a story of a young black girl, abused by her drunken father, who wishes to have blue eyes so she can be beautiful.

In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old Ellen," an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong. There is something...

Blinking Jack Stokes was a skinny tenant farmer, and Ruby Pitt Woodrow was "the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry ... They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.

This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought force them to seek work in the city. The working people...

From the highly acclaimed, award-winning author of Floating in My Mother's Palm comes a stunning novel about ordinary people living in extraordinary times. Trudi Montag is a Zwerga dwarfshort, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans sharefrom her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he's...

In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When...

Talk about unlucky sevens. An hour ago, seventeen-year-old, seven months pregnant Novalee Nation was heading for California with her boyfriend. Now she finds herself stranded at a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, with just $7.77 in change. But Novalee is about to discover hidden treasures in this small Southwest town--a group of down-to-earth, deeply caring people willing to help a homeless, jobless girl living secretly in a Wal-Mart. From Bible-thumping...

Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany. When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his loverthen she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young...

The story of a jinxed family, a catalog of rape, incest and death. A first novel set in Nova Scotia early this century.