Central Kansas Library System

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.

Four black children growing up in rural Mississippi during the Depression experience racial antagonisms and hard times, but learn from their parents the pride and self-respect they need to survive.

Written in an incredibly compressed five-month period, the novel had an electrifying impact upon publication in 1939, unleashing a political storm with its vision of America's dispossessed struggling for survival. It continues to exert a powerful influence on American culture, and has inspired artists as diverse as John Ford, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen.

Olivia Harker Cross owns a mountain -- or thinks she does -- in Pope County, Kentucky, a land where wolves howl at night. But now someone is killing the wolves on Big Foley Mountain, and Olivia is beginning to realize how much of her own bitter history she has never understood -- her mother's madness or her daughter's flight to California leaving her to raise William, her beloved grandson. But most of all, Olivia doesn't understand her town's rage,...