From the Publisher:
    "Fifteen-year-old Kambili's world is circumscribed by the high walls and frangipani trees of her family compound. Her wealthy Catholic father, under whose shadow Kambili lives, while generous and politically active in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili's father sends her and her brother away to stay with their aunt, a university professor, whose house is noisy and full of laughter. There, Kambili and her brother discover a life and love beyond the confines of their father's authority. The visit will lift the silence from their world and, in time, give rise to devotion and defiance that reveal themselves in profound and unexpected ways. This is a book about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood; between love and hatred, between the old gods and the new."

From Amazon.com:
    "Purple Hibiscus, Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's debut, begins like many novels set in regions considered exotic by the western reader: the politics, climate, social customs, and, above all, food of Nigeria (balls of fufu rolled between the fingers, okpa bought from roadside vendors) unfold like the purple hibiscus of the title, rare and fascinating. But within a few pages, these details, however vividly rendered, melt into the background of a larger, more compelling story of a joyless family. Fifteen-year-old Kambili is the dutiful and self-effacing daughter of a rich man, a religious fanatic and domestic tyrant whose public image is of a politically courageous newspaper publisher and philanthropist. No one in Papa's ancestral village, where he is titled "Omelora" (One Who Does For the Community), knows why Kambili¹s brother cannot move one of his fingers, nor why her mother keeps losing her pregnancies. When a widowed aunt takes an interest in Kambili, her family begins to unravel and re-form itself in unpredictable ways."

From Publishers Weekly:
    "By turns luminous and horrific, this debut ensnares the reader from the first page and lingers in the memory long after its tragic end. First-person narrator Kambili Achike is a 15-year-old Nigerian girl growing up in sheltered privilege in a country ravaged by political strife and personal struggle. She and her brother, Jaja, and their quiet mother, who speaks "the way a bird eats, in small amounts," live this life of luxury because Kambili's father is a wealthy man who owns factories, publishes a politically outspoken newspaper and outwardly leads the moral, humble life of a faithful Catholic. The many grateful citizens who have received his blessings and material assistance call him Omelora, "The One Who Does for the Community." Yet Kambili, Jaja and their mother see a side to their provider no one else does: he is also a religious fanatic who regularly and viciously beats his family for the mildest infractions of his interpretation of an exemplary Christian life. The children know better than to discuss their home life with anyone else; "there was so much that we never told." But when they are unexpectedly allowed to visit their liberated and loving Aunty Ifeoma, a widowed university professor raising three children, family secrets and tensions bubble dangerously to the surface, setting in motion a chain of events that allow Kambili to slowly blossom as she begins to question the authority of the precepts and adults she once held sacred. In a soft, searing voice, Adichie examines the complexities of family, faith and country through the haunted but hopeful eyes of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. Lush, cadenced and often disconcerting, this is an accomplished first effort."

From the Publisher:
    "On a bone-chilling New Year's Day, when all the mountain roads are slick with ice, Clay's mother, Anneth, insists on leaving her husband. She packs her things, and with three-year-old Clay in tow, they inch their way toward her hometown along the treacherous mountain roads. That journey ends in the death of Clay's mother. It's a day that comes to haunt her only son, who's left without a family and a history. This is the story of how Clay Sizemore, a coal miner in love with his town but unsure of his place within it, finds a family to call his own. And it's the story of the people who become part of the life he shapes: Aunt Easter, always filled with a sense of foreboding and bound to her faith above all; Uncle Paul, quietly producing quilt after quilt; Dreama, beautiful and flighty; Evangeline, the untameable daughter of a famous gospel singer; and Alma, the fiddler whose song wends its way into Clay's heart. Together, they all help Clay to fashion a quilt of a life from what treasured pieces are around him. Authentic and moving, Clay's Quilt is both the story of a young man's journey and of Appalachian people struggling to hold on to their heritage."

From Kirkus Reviews:
    "A Kentucky author's plaintive debut tells the story of coal miner Clay Sizemore's efforts to understand and possess his own history, shattered when he was a three-year-old present at his own mother's murder. The novel segues between Clay's relationships with loving kinfolk and his growing affection for Alma Asher, the divorced woman he hopefully marries-its separate fragments intended to cohere into a "quilt" (of sorts) that will clarify the pattern of Clay's life. This is Wendell Berry territory, and House doesn't really take us anywhere we haven't already been-but his secondary characters (such as Clay's hell-raising cousin Cake and his gentle, visionary Aunt Easter) are lively and likable. And there are some stunningly beautiful moments (e.g., "When the lightning flashed, he imagined he could see all of the dead people he had ever known of, standing in line down the road"). An appealing and promising debut."

From Publishers Weekly:
   "A deep love for home suffuses this heartfelt, well-crafted debut novel set in the Kentucky hills. Clay Sizemore, a young coal miner from a big family and a small town, never doubts that he will live out his life in the place where he was born. His mother, Anneth, was killed when he was only four, and he never knew his father, but he is surrounded by the people he loves: his big-hearted, God-fearing Aunt Easter; Dreama, the beautiful cousin he loves like a sister; and Cake, his party boy best friend. Clay and Cake work hard, and play hard at the local honky-tonk, but both want more from life than work, drink and empty sex. For Clay, the future is Alma, a passionate young fiddler separated from her abusive husband and estranged from her gospel-singing parents. But the past concerns him, too: given a box of his beloved mother's possessions, he pieces together her troubled history, while his great-uncle pieces a quilt from her clothing. Violence is inescapable in a place where even Clay carries a pretty pearl-handled pistol, and his mother's violent end foreshadows a death that threatens Clay and Alma's happiness together. The Kentucky landscape is suffused with nostalgia, snow making one character yearn for the past, lonesome autumn unlocking memory's vaults. Deftly written, replete with wisdom and remarkably light on sentimentality, this lovely novel makes plain the value of family and the preciousness of familiar ground."

From the Publisher:
    “The U.S.-Mexican border is one of the most permeable boundaries in the world, breached daily by Mexicans in search of work.  Thousands die crossing the line and those who reach “the other side” are branded illegals; they are undocumented and unprotected.  Crossing Over puts a human face on the phenomenon, following the exodus of the Chavez clan, an extended Mexican family that had already lost three sons in a tragic border accident.  Martinez traces the migrants progress from their small southern Mexican town of Cheran to California, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Arkansas, where far from joining the melting pot, Martinez argues, the estimated eight million undocumented migrants are creating a new culture that will alter both Mexico and the United States as the two countries come increasingly to resemble each other.”

From Amazon.com:
    "Not since Ted Conover's Coyotes has a book revealed the underground culture of illegal immigration from Mexico as well as Crossing Over by Rubén Martínez. This up-and-coming author writes of what he calls "a Mexican Manifest Destiny" that continually pierces the southern borderline of the United States--a 'line [that] is still more an idea than a reality.'  Crossing Over is an outstanding book, and required reading for anyone interested in Hispanics and the new America.

From Publishers Weekly:
    "Martinez, an American of Mexican emigri parents, gets terrifically close to his subjects, following them from stultifying poverty in Mexico to mortally dangerous illegal crossings and harsh and also dangerous (and illegal) work in Arkansas, Connecticut, Missouri and California. Martinez draws a wealth of social, ethnic, linguistic and economic nuance in completely absorbing narratives."

From the Publisher:
    “Somehow, the sweeping changes of the Civil Rights movement had bypassed rural McIntosh County, Georgia.  In the 1970s, the white sheriff there still wielded all power; he controlled everyone and everything.  It took one uneducated, unemployed black man with a passion for justice to take him on and win, changing life in McIntosh County forever.  Praying for Sheetrock is about that one man, his victory and his fall from grace.”

From Amazon.com:
    "Praying for Sheetrock is the saga of how, thanks to the leadership of a black shop-steward-turned-county-commissioner named Thurnell Alston, together with the aid of a cadre of idealistic Legal Services lawyers (Melissa Greene was one of their paralegals) this situation began to change."

From Publishers Weekly:
    "As the first black commissioner of McIntosh County, Ga., retired boilermaker Thurnell Alston brought the civil rights struggle to a coastal backwater in the 1970s. He initiated voting rights lawsuits, fought drugs and introduced medical clinics, plumbing and running water to 'a forgotten county needy in every way.'"

From the Publisher:
    “Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along US Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars, stacks of blown-out tires, and primeval jungles of rusted metal.  Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South.”

From Publishers Weekly:
    "Ray, a poet and an environmental activist, takes a tough-minded look at life in rural southern Georgia in this blend of memoir and nature study. "

From amazon.com:
    "Janisse Ray delivers in her memorable debut, a memoir of life in a part of America that roads and towns have passed by, a land settled by hardscrabble Scots herders who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, and who bear the derogatory epithet "cracker" with quiet pride."

From the Publisher:
    “In the middle of a moonless night on a deserted beach east of Havana three men lash inner tubes together to make a flimsy raft they slide into the surf.  Desperate to escape a society gone wrong, they risk an incredible journey across the more than ninety miles of treacherous waters that separate the island of Cuba from the Florida Keys.
    In this powerful and lyrical novel, J. Joaquin Fraxedas has crafted an epic story of three courageous men, men willing to endure the hazards of the open sea, men caught in the mindless violence of a hurricane with nothing to hang onto but an inner tube, men willing to die in their attempt to gain freedom.”

From Publishers Weekly:
    "Three men flee Castro's Cuba in 1990 on a makeshift raft bound for Florida in this harrowing, taut yet lyrical first novel. Fraxedas, who escaped Communist Cuba at the age of 10 and now practices law in Orlando, has flown rescue missions to pick up Cuban raft people, and he puts his firsthand knowledge to good use. "

From Library Journal:
    "This modern odyssey is based on the author's interviews as a volunteer rescue pilot with Cuban refugees who, under cover of darkness, waded off into the 90-mile strait between Cuba and Florida clutching any flotation available. Juan Cabrera, a Cuban professor of physics and astronomy who learned early to deny his upper-class origins, persuades two friends to escape with him on a raft made of three inner tubes."

From the Publisher:
    “When Jennifer, a college student, returns to her childhood home of Hoot Owl Holler with a tape recorder, the tales of murder and suicide, incest and blood ties, bring to life a vibrant story of a doomed family that still refuses to give up....”

From Library Journal:
    "From moonshine to murder to love and Amway, Smith displays her remarkable talent for capturing the changing texture of a community through the language and dreams of its inhabitants."

From the Publisher:
    “Dr. Alvord left a dusty reservation in New Mexico for Stanford University Medical School, becoming the first Navajo woman surgeon.  Rising above the odds presented by her own culture and the male-dominated world of surgeons, she returned to the reservation to find a new challenge.  In dramatic encounters, Dr. Alvord discovered the power of belief to influence health, for good or for ill.  She came to merge the latest breakthroughs of medical science with the ancient tribal paths to recovery and wellness, following the Navajo philosophy of a balanced and harmonious life, called Walking in Beauty.”

From Publishers Weekly:
    "In this inspiring memoir, Alvord, assisted by Van Pelt, describes her endeavors to integrate a Navaho approach to healing with high-tech medical procedures."

From Library Journal:
    "Alvord takes readers on an absorbing journey straddling two worlds. Her book, written with journalist Van Pelt, describes her path to eventual success in combining highly technical, modern medicine with the traditional Navajo philosophy of balance and harmony known as 'Walking in Beauty.' "

From the Publisher:
    “Annadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in.  It stole everything it hadn’t bothered to buy - land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women.
    Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C.J. Marcum.  Fierce loveless union man Rondal Lloyd.  Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal.  And lonely Sicilian immigrant Rosa Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines.
    They all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic battle of Blair Mountain - when the United States Army greeted 10,000 unemployed pro-union miners with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas.  It was the first crucial battle of a war that has yet to be won.”

From Publishers Weekly:
    "Four strong, entirely different voices evoke the passion and the pain of unionizing the coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia in the early 20th century. The canvas is broad, the action complex but even minor characters quicken to life in this memorable, beautifully written novel."

From School Library Journal:
    "This well-written novel is an earnest recreation of the turbulent events in the West Virginia coal fields during the early decades of this century."

From the Publisher:
    “The story of a day in the life of Joe Robert Kirkman, a North Carolina mountain school teacher, sly prankster, country philosopher, and family man, won the hearts of readers and reviewers across the country.  Brighten the Corner Where you Are is a beautifully written novel by one of America’s most gifted and most delightful writers.”

From Publishers Weekly:
    "A finely drawn series of minor characters, including stoic farmers and wives, tale-spinning coon hunters and a shrewd local reporter, enriches this modest yet deeply satisfying chronicle."

From Library Journal:
    "A superb comic work."