"Asa's husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family's home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips...

He knew now that neither the wilderness nor the dark weather, devils, nor the infinite void, mattered to him in the least. His love for Deborah made him impregnable to terror, gave him a grasp of truth deeper than reason. He had found the golden arrow, to his own agony and ennobling." At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Deborah Arden is living with her father John, mother Patty and younger brother Joe in their cottage high up on the exposed...

"Late October 1909, and the season of ghouls and things that go bump in the night has descended on the village of Littleton Cotterell. Lady Hardcastle and her trusted lady's maid, Florence, find themselves hosting a colourful cast of actors whose spooky moving picture, The Witch's Downfall, is being shown to mark Halloween. But things take a macabre turn when the first night's screening ends with a mysterious murder, and the second night with another......

"Mallory Moe is a twenty-five-year-old veteran Army mechanic, living with her girlfriend, Andrea, and working overnights at a gas station store while figuring out what's next. Andrea's off-grid cabin provides a perfect sanctuary for Mallory, a synesthete with a hypersensitivity to sound that can trigger flashbacks from her childhood. The getaway that's largely abandoned during the off season starts out idyllic, until Andrea's once-loving behavior...

In this special story set in the "new" South, John Holman records with a pitch-perfect ear the emerging voice of black experience. Rita is dedicated. Ask her math students, or her baby brother, Grim, whom she raised after their mother died and their father disappeared, or her husband, Mayes Mello, a cryophysicist. They'll all agree. What they won't say is that Rita is also prone to hallucinations and at times is "in danger." Rita's is a world of...

"This is an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America's most defining eras-the Great Depression. Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived...

Collects twenty-three stories set in and around Cork, depicting "the thoughts and acts of the ordinary men and women of town and field.