An astounding multigenerational saga, Red Clay chronicles the interwoven lives of an enslaved Black family and their white owners as the Civil War ends and Reconstruction begins.

In 1943, when a frail old white woman shows up in Red Clay, Alabama, at the home of a Black former slave--on the morning following his funeral--his family hardly knows what to expect after she utters the words ... a lifetime ago, my family owned yours. Adelaide Parker has a story to tell--one of ambition, betrayal, violence, and redemption--that shaped both the fate of her family and that of the late Felix H. Parker.

But there are gaps in her knowledge, and she's come to Red Clay seeking answers from a family with whom she shares a name and a history that neither knows in full. In an epic saga that takes us from Red Clay to Paris, to the Côte d'Azur and New Orleans, human frailties are pushed to their limits as secrets are exposed and the line between good and evil becomes ever more difficult to discern. Red Clay is a tale that deftly lays bare the ugliness of slavery, the uncertainty of the final months of the Civil War, the optimism of Reconstruction, and the pain and frustration of Jim Crow.

With a vivid sense of place and a cast of memorable characters, Charles B. Fancher draws upon his own family history to weave a riveting tale of triumph over adversity, set against a backdrop of societal change and racial animus that reverberates in contemporary America. Through seasons of joy and unspeakable pain, Fancher delivers rich moments as allies become enemies, and enemies--to their great surprise--find new respect for each other.

A riveting reimagining for readers of March by Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Miller's Caroline and Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet.

An intriguing take on some of the most beloved--yet, paradoxically, overlooked--characters in fiction. --Shana Abé, New York Times bestselling author of An American Beauty and The Second Mrs. Astor

I'm sure you believe you know their story from reading that other book, which told you an inspiring tale about four sisters. It told you a story, but did it tell you the story?

Four sisters, each as different as can be. Through the eyes and words of Jo, their characters and destinies became known to millions. Meg, pretty and conventional. Jo, stubborn, tomboyish, and ambitious. Beth, shy and good-natured, a mortal angel readily accepting her fate. And Amy, elegant, frivolous, and shallow. But Jo, for all her insight, could not always know what was in her sisters' thoughts, or in their hearts.

With Jo away in New York to pursue her literary ambitions, Meg, Beth, and Amy follow their own paths. Meg, newly married with young twins, struggles to find the contentment that Marmee assured her would come with domesticity. Unhappy and unfulfilled, she turns to her garden, finding there not just a hobby but a calling that will allow her to help other women in turn.

Beth knows her time is limited. Still, part of her longs to break out of her suffocating cocoon at home, however briefly. A new acquaintance turns into something more, offering unexpected, quiet joy.

Amy, traveling in Europe while she pursues her goal of becoming an artist, is keenly aware of the expectation that she will save the family by marrying well. Through the course of her journey, she discovers how she can remain true to herself, true to her art, and true to the love that was always meant to be.

Purposefully leaving Jo off the page, authors Liz Parker, Ally Malinenko, and Linda Epstein draw inspiration from Alcott's real-life sisters, giving the other March women room to reveal themselves through conversations, private correspondence, and intimate moments--coming alive in ways that might surprise even daring, unconventional Jo.

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
One of NPR's 10 Best Novels of 2011

From the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) comes Train Dreams, an epic in miniature, and one of Johnson's most evocative works of fiction.

Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West--its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders--this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.

It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century--an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.

Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and eleven-year-old Robert, on their small subsistence farm. They do not support the Confederacy's position on slavery, but Joetta considers her family to be neutral, believing this is simply not their fight.

Her opinion is not favored by many in their community, including Joetta's own father-in-law, Rudean. A staunch Confederate supporter, he fills his grandsons' heads with stories about the glory of battle and the Southern cause until one night Henry runs off to join the war. At Joetta's frantic insistence, Ennis leaves to find their son and bring him home.

But soon weeks pass with no word from father or son and Joetta is battered by the strain of running a farm with so little help. As the country becomes further entangled in the ramifications of war, Joetta finds herself increasingly at odds with those around her - until one act of kindness brings her family to the edge of even greater disaster.

Though shunned and struggling to survive, Joetta remains committed to her principles, and to her belief that her family will survive. But the greatest tests are still to come - for a fractured nation, for Joetta, and for those she loves . . .

Moberg's extensive research in the papers of Swedish emigrants in archival collections enabled him to incorporate many details of pioneer life. First published between 1949 and 1959 in Swedish, these four books were considered a single work by Moberg, who intended that they be read as documentary novels. These reprint editions contain introductions written by Roger McKnight of Gustavus Adolphus College, and they restore Moberg's bibliography not included in earlier English editions.

The first book in the series, The Emigrants introduces Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson, their three young children, and eleven others who make up a resolute party of Swedes fleeing the poverty, religious persecution, and social oppression of Småland in 1850.

The other books in the series--Unto a Good Land (I), Unto a Good Land (II), and The Last Letter Home (IV)--are also available from the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

A searing Southern Gothic saga unfolds in the Texas Hill Country, where history's silenced voices rise amidst an astonishing tale.

On the eve of the Civil War, Polish immigrants Marcin and Agnieszka Anderwald arrive in Bandera, Texas, seeking a fresh start in a new land of fertile soil and freedom. But their dreams quickly become nightmares when Marcin provokes a sinister specter hell-bent on revenge. A battle ensues for the hearts, minds, and souls of the Anderwalds and their extended family of immigrant outcasts, Arab camel wranglers, wounded warriors, and a songstress on the verge of madness. As the generations unfold, each must confront its darkest fears. Can faith, love, and sacrifice overcome unrelenting evil, or will the Anderwalds remain forever wretched and undone?

The Wretched and Undone is a sweeping saga set in the heart of the Texas Hill Country and inspired by real people and actual events. Heralded as a genre-bending thrill ride through Old Texas, with characters so well-crafted they crawl off the page, the novel was named a Killer Nashville Top Pick for 2024 and a Claymore Award Finalist for Best Southern Gothic.

Consumed with grief, driven by vengeance, a man undertakes an unrelenting odyssey across the lawless post-Civil War frontier seeking redemption in this fearless novel from the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of News of the World.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John's beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered.

Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

Traveling through the unforgiving landscape of a shattered nation in the midst of Reconstruction, John braves winter storms and confronts desperate people in pursuit of his quarry. Untethered, single-minded in purpose, he will not be deterred. Not by the U.S. Marshal who threatens to arrest him for murder should he succeed. And not by Victoria Reavis, the telegraphist aiding him in his death-driven quest, yet hoping he'll choose to embrace a life with her instead.

And as he trails Dodd deep into Texas, John accepts that this final reckoning between them may cost him more than all he's already lost...

Now a Major Motion Picture

National Book Award Finalist--Fiction

In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.

In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna's parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own. Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.

Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act civilized. Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forming a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.

Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember--strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden. A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become--in the eyes of the law--a kidnapper himself.

How to Dodge a Cannonballis a razor-sharp satire diving into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.

How to Dodge a Cannonball is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future--as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.

Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler--until he's captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate--until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.

His new brothers are even stranger, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking ill-timed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayle's satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyone's definition of loyalty.

Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball asks if America is worth fighting for. And then answers loudly. Read it while it's still legal.

Stirring . . . In telling this important, neglected history with imagination-fueled research, The American Daughters offers an inspiring story of people who show a way forward with their perseverance, bravery and love.--The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

AN ELECTRIC LIT AND KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family's rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite--and with help from these strong women--Ady learns how to put herself first. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.

The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.

Happiness and grief seem such incompatible partners, and yet, ever since meeting Thomas Linz, they have become Charlotte Gallagher's constant companions. Taking place in the rugged Colorado of 1867, Call of the Mountains chronicles the journey of a young woman and her fight to survive. This first novel from Annie Coffey tackles the tough topics of trauma, healing, faith, and forgiveness.

From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth.

In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth--breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one--is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.

As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country's leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy.

Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.

Georgia burns.

Sherman's Yankees are closing in.

Will the women of LaGrange run or fight?

Based on the true story of the celebrated Nancy Hart Rifles, The Cotillion Brigade is a sweeping epic of the Civil War's ravages on family and love, the resilient bonds of sisterhood amid devastation, and the miracle of reconciliation between bitter enemies.

Gone With The Wind meets A League Of Their Own.

1856. Sixteen-year-old Nannie Colquitt Hill makes her debut in the antebellum society of the Chattahoochee River plantations. A thousand miles to the north, a Wisconsin farm boy, Hugh LaGrange, joins an Abolitionist crusade to ban slavery in Bleeding Kansas.

Five years later, secession and total war against the homefronts of Dixie hurl them toward a confrontation unrivaled in American history.

Nannie defies the traditions of Southern gentility by forming a women's militia and drilling it four long years to prepare for battle. With their men dead, wounded, or retreating with the Confederate armies, only Captain Nannie and her Fighting Nancies stand between their beloved homes and the Yankee torches.

Hardened into a slashing Union cavalry colonel, Hugh duels Rebel generals Joseph Wheeler and Nathan Bedford Forrest across Tennessee and Alabama. As the war churns to a bloody climax, he is ordered to drive a burning stake deep into the heart of the Confederacy.

Yet one Georgia town-which by mocking coincidence bears Hugh's last name-stands defiant in his path.

Read the remarkable story of the Southern women who formed America's most famous female militia and the Union officer whose life they changed forever.

Moberg's extensive research in the papers of Swedish emigrants in archival collections enabled him to incorporate many details of pioneer life. First published between 1949 and 1959 in Swedish, these four books were considered a single work by Moberg, who intended that they be read as documentary novels. These reprint editions contain introductions written by Roger McKnight of Gustavus Adolphus College, and they restore Moberg's bibliography not included in earlier English editions.

The second book in the series, Unto a Good Land opens in the summer of 1850 as the emigrants disembark in New York City. Their journey to a new home in Minnesota Territory takes them by riverboat, steam wagon, Great Lakes steamship, and oxcart to Chisago County.

The other books in the series--The Emigrants (I), The Settlers (III), and The Last Letter Home (IV)--are also available from the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Stirring . . . In telling this important, neglected history with imagination-fueled research, The American Daughters offers an inspiring story of people who show a way forward with their perseverance, bravery and love.--The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

AN ELECTRIC LIT AND KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family's rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters. With the courage instilled in her by Sanite--and with help from these strong women--Ady learns how to put herself first. So begins her journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.

The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.

Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was a powerful indictment of slavery in America. Describing the many trials and eventual escape to freedom of the long-suffering, good-hearted slave Uncle Tom, it aimed to show how Christian love can overcome any human cruelty. Uncle Tom's Cabin has remained controversial to this day, seen as either a vital milestone in the anti-slavery cause or as a patronising stereotype of African-Americans, yet it played a crucial role in the eventual abolition of slavery and remains one of the most important American novels ever written.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

BLOOD IS SUPPOSED TO BE THICKER THAN WATER. But he made my blood spill like water. So I crossed waters to leave blood behind, hoping I wouldn't leave a trail for him to follow and find me. Still, when I am enjoying the fruits of freedom most, that is when I think I see him-in a crowd or just outside a darkened window-determined to have his slave returned.

AT ONE TIME, I WONDERED HOW HE WOULD HAVE FELT ABOUT CALLING ME HIS SON. The circumstances of my birth were not unusual. But, while many slaves may only hear rumors about their parentage... I know mine for sure. I am Percival Bishop, the bastard of my master, Joachim Bishop.

BUT I COULD NEVER TRULY BE HIS SON. I was born a slave. I was taught to think like a slave; to pray and dream like a slave; to hunger and thirst, to regard the possible and impossible like a slave. I must not forget that. Because now I must break that slave apart. I must make myself anew. Into a man. In my own image.