Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation's Citation for Fiction. An eleven-year-old heroine tells her unforgettable story with honesty, perceptivity, humor, and unselfconscious heroism. The honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word!--Eudora Welty; A lovely, breathtaking, sometimes heart-wrenching first novel.--Walker Percy. A LITERARY GUILD SELECTION.

When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.

Kaye Gibbons's first novel, Ellen Foster, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the praise of writers from Walker Percy to Eudora Welty. In A Virtuous Woman, Gibbons transcends her early promise, creating a multilayered and indelibly convincing portrait of two seemingly ill-matched people who somehow miraculously make a marriage.

A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self-taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts.

Sophia, Margaret, and Charlie Kate find strength in a time when women almost always depended on men, and their bond deepens as each one experiences love and loss during World War II. Charms for the Easy Life is a passionate, luminous, and exhilarating story about embracing what life has to offer ... even if it means finding it in unconventional ways.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Autumn 1918. Rumors of peace are spreading across America, but spreading even faster are the first cases of Spanish influenza, whispering of the epidemic to come. Maureen Ross, well past a safe childbearing age, is experiencing a difficult pregnancy. Her husband, Troop -- cold and careless of her condition -- has battered her spirit throughout their marriage. Into this loveless m nage arrives Troop's niece, Mary Oliver, who has come to help Maureen in the last weeks of her confinement. Horrified by Troop's bullying, she realizes that her true duty is to protect her aunt.

As the influenza spreads and the death toll grows, Troop's spiteful behavior worsens. He terrorizes the household, but when Mary fights back he begins to go over the edge. Maureen rallies, releasing a stunning thunderstorm of confrontation and, ultimately, finding spiritual renewal.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

In this sequel to Gibbons's beloved classic Ellen Foster, Ellen, now fifteen, is settled into a permanent home with a new mother. Strengthened by adversity and blessed with enough intelligence to design a salvation for herself, she still feels ill at ease. But while she holds fast to the shreds of her child­hood--humoring her best friend, Stuart, who is determined to marry her; and protecting her old neighbor, slow-witted Starletta--she begins to negotiate her way into a larger world.

With a singular mix of perspicacity, naïveté, and compas­sion, Ellen draws us into her life and makes us fall in love with her all over again.

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Ellen Foster, Kaye Gibbons paints intimate family portraits in lyrical prose, using as her palette the rich, vibrant colors of the American South. Sights Unseen shows the author at her most passionate and heartfelt best -- an unforgettable tale of unconditional love, and of a family's desperate search for normalcy in the midst of mental illness. It is a novel of rare poignancy, wit, and evocative power -- the story of the relationship between Hattie Barnes and her emotionally elusive mother, Maggie, known by their neighbors as that Barnes woman with all the problems.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Deeply satisfying. . . . A muscular narrative that humanizes all sides of that bloody conflict--North and South, Black and white, male and female. . . a robust novel that deserves to be set on the shelf alongside Cold Mountain. -- Orlando Sentinel

Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, a plantation owner's daughter, grows up in a privileged lifestyle, but it's not all roses. Her family's prosperity is linked to the institution of slavery, and Clarice, a close and trusted family servant, exposes Emma to the truth and history of their plantation and how it brutally affected the slave population.

Her father, Samuel P. Tate, has an aggressive and overpowering persona that intimidates many people--including Emma. But she refuses to conform to his ideals and marries a prominent young doctor. Together they face the horrors of the Civil War, nursing wounded soldiers, as Emma begins the long journey toward her own recovery from the terrible forces that shaped her father's life.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.