A novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there...

The poignant and captivating story of one young woman's journey across America during the Dust Bowl years. After a violent dust storm leaves their mother dead and the family farm in ruins, twelve-year-old Laurie Field and her younger brother, Buddy, believe their world has ended when their grieving, debt-ridden father brings them to live with their reprobate grandfather in the Oklahoma Panhandle, promising to send for them when he finds one of those...

"When a rainmaker is bludgeoned to death in the pitch-blackness of a colossal dust storm, small-town sheriff Temple Jennings shoulders yet another burden in the hard times of the 1930s Dust Bowl."--

The Worthams and Hammonds are as close as two families could be, sharing almost everything on their Depression-era Illinois farms. So when a raging fire breaks out and threatens to destroy the Hammond farm, both families are affected by the tragedy. But how did the fire start? Several of the kids know the truth, but no one is talking. As the families try to overcome aching loss, misplaced blame, troubled relationships, and an upsetting secret, they...

Meet George Marvin Brush--Don Quixote come to Main Street in the Great Depression, and one of Thornton Wilder's most memorable characters. George Brush, a traveling textbook salesman, is a fervent religious convert who is determined to lead a good life. With sad and sometimes hilarious consequences, his travels take him through smoking cars, bawdy houses, banks, and campgrounds from Texas to Illinois--and into the soul of America itself. -- Provided...

Hungry Men, first published in 1935, is a Depression-era novel portraying an unemployed musician, Acel Strecker, who travels America as a hobo, taking odd-jobs when he can, and begging for food when he can't. His experiences, both good and bad, paint a vivid picture of life in America in the 1930s. While in New York, Acel meets and falls in love with an unemployed typist, and together they share a number of adventures. Eventually, Acel forms a street...

Dorothy Garlock weaves a thrilling tale of life in Depression-era Missouri, as the folks of Fertile-including the beloved Jones clan-brace for disaster... one that could expose this quaint midwestern town to a flood of shameful truths and shattering secrets.
When pretty April Asbury arrives in Fertile, Missouri, to take her place as Dr. Forbes's new nurse, she's looking forward to life in this picturesque town. And it doesn't disappoint....

By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighteen, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive. A bittersweet...

The grim story of a farmer and his family in the calamitous years of the early thirties. North Dakota setting.

When Harry Crane discovers the mutilated body of a young African-American woman, he unwittingly unleashes a storm of fear, racial animosities, and violence.