Set in a Southern, city-swallowed town, The Garden Angel tells the story of two women and their unlikey friendship. Cutter Johanson is plucky and eccentric, nostalgic about her family's once glorious past. She has her hands full warding off potential buyers from the dilapidated homestead she is determined to keep. Though the neighborhood has changed, even grown shabby, Father Bob's Home for Retarded Men across the street has become a sort of extended...

Young Ovella rejoices as her community comes together to raise money and build a much-needed school in the 1920s, with matching funds from the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company and support from Professor James of the Normal School.

Eighteen-year-old Sawyer accepts her estranged grandmother's bribe to live with her for a year, participate in the debutante season and ball, and possibly meet the father she has never known.

After a day of picking cotton in late 1860, Ella May, a young slave, joins her friends Bobby and Sue at their second job of listening outside the windows of their master's house for useful information.

Explores the explosive tensions of the South in the mid-1950s through the prism of a young girl's friendship with her black maid and the currents of violence, infidelity, and corruption that run beneath the polite surface of her family's life.

After the Civil War Paul, the son of a white father and a black mother, finds himself caught between the two worlds of colored folks and white folks as he pursues his dream of owning land of his own.

The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

"New Orleans, May 1862. The largest city in the ill-starred confederacy has fallen to Union troops under the soon-to-be-infamous General Benjamin 'the Beast' Butler ... When twelve-year-old Joseph Woolsack disappears from his home, he draws into the unrest his mother Elise, a mixed-race woman passing for white, and his father Angel, whose long and wicked life is drawing to a close. What follows forces mother and son into a dark new world: Joseph must...