Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it's the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in...

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then...

Left on the Thorntons' doorstep by her dying mother, Hannah suffers a harsh existence at the hands of Mrs. Thorton and is forced into marriage, at age sixteen, with the local butcher.

The multigenerational story set in a nineteenth-century village in the northern English countryside tells of the enduring struggles between the classes.

As a diversion from his job in his uncle's carpentry shop, newly arrived Robert Bradley begins to explore the Durham countryside. It is on one of these walks that he meets Millie, the ethereal girl-child whose odd ways and nocturnal wanderings had led her to be known as Thorman's Moth.

"Saint Petersburg, 1812. Russian forces have defeated Napoleon at great cost, and the tsar's empire is once again at peace. Sasha, a captain in the Imperial Army, returns home to Grand Duke Felix, the disgraced second son of the tsar as well as his irrepressibly charming lover. However, their reunion is quickly interrupted by the arrival of Sofia, a mysteirously persuasive figure whose disruptive presence Sasha suspects to be something more than human....

Named by the Guardian as one of our top ten writers of rural noir, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a keen observer of life and trouble in rural America, and her working-class protagonists can be at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop of all the men in their world. Such richly fraught mother-daughter...