Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Margaret Mitchell's great novel of the South is one of the most popular books ever written. Within six months of its publication in 1936, Gone With the Wind had sold a million copies. To date, it has been translated into 25 languages, and more than 28 million copies have been sold. Here are the characters that have become symbols of passion and desire....

Orphaned during her passage from Ireland, young, white Lavinia arrives on the steps of the kitchen house and is placed, as an indentured servant, under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate slave daughter. Lavinia learns to cook, clean, and serve food while guided by the quiet strength and love of her new family. In time Lavinia is accepted into the world of the big house, caring for the master's opium-addicted wife and befriending his dangerous yet protective son. She attempts to straddle the worlds of the kitchen and big house, but her skin color will forever set her apart.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Moments after Lisbeth is born, she’s taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come. Though Lisbeth leads a life of privilege, she finds nothing but loneliness in the company of her overwhelmed mother and her distant, slave-owning father.

Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Ever since she can remember, dark-eyed Susan Armitage has longed for Logan Vance - the one man who can never be hers. But a twist of fate and her own reckless desire drive Susan to scandalize St. Louis society by agreeing to accompany Logan and his two young children on a long, perilous journey west through Indian Territory. In the rugged Oklahoma wilderness, Logan and Susan’s long-denied passion for each other can finally be fulfilled. Yet even as they glory in each other at last, they find their dreams threatened by the dangerous realities of frontier life.

Declan O'Bryan left Ireland to seek his fortune in the New World, but the journey was long for a man without a penny to his name. It took years of back-breaking work as a sailor and a journeyman for him to finally reach Montana, and to have enough money to his name to earn the title of proud homesteader. There's only one thing missing from his life now, and, unlike the boys in town, he's not convinced a man should find a wife in a catalog, the same way he buys a plow.

When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."

The best-selling author of Voodoo Dreams focuses on two women who loved the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Anna, a free woman of color, was his rescuer, his loving wife and mother to his children. Ottilie Assing, a white German woman, became his intellectual soul mate and mistress. At times, they all lived under the same roof.

This is the story of an extraordinary friendship between two remarkable women, both caught in the shadow of slavery in the 19th-century South. One is an escaped black slave under sentence of death; the other is white, yet committed to end the horrors her neighbors accept as a matter of course. Ruby Dee's passionate and sensitive readings gives a poignant sense of reality to this magnificent novel of courage, daring and love.

Fragrant blossoms herald spring, but the orchard is also a place of secrets and heartache. After the death of her husband Frank, Eliza is left with three young children and mounting debts. When a gentle stranger enters her orchard, she experiences a peculiar sensation of familiarity with the man. But will his unknown past jeopardize all that she has fought for?

Left suddenly penniless, the Honorable Sophia Grafton, a viscount's orphaned daughter, sails to the New World to claim the only property left to her name: a tobacco plantation in the remote wilds of colonial Virginia. Enlisting the reluctant assistance of a handsome young French spy - at gunpoint - she gathers an unlikely group of escaped slaves and indentured servants, each seeking their own safe haven in the untamed New World.

Since they were children running barefoot about Toulouse Plantation, Josie and Cleo have been as close as sisters, forging an unbreakable bond that defies their roles as mistress and slave. Together, the two have shared secrets and protected each other through happiness and heartbreak. They never dream they could also share an intense passion for the same man, the elegant, charming, and irresistibly seductive Bertrand Chamard.

They were women whose lives began in slavery, who weathered the Civil War, and who grappled with the contradictions of emancipation through the turbulent early years of the 20th century. Through it all, they fought to unite their family and forge success on their own terms.

1891... Spinster librarian Olive Wilkins is shocked to learn of her brother's violent death at a saloon gaming table and her sister-in-law's subsequent murder, traveling far from her staid life to rescue her niece and nephew, now orphans. She arrives to find the circumstances of her brother's life deplorable and her long held beliefs of family and tradition, shaken.

This is the story of an extraordinary friendship between two remarkable women, both caught in the shadow of slavery in the 19th-century South. One is an escaped black slave under sentence of death; the other is white, yet committed to end the horrors her neighbors accept as a matter of course. Ruby Dee's passionate and sensitive readings gives a poignant sense of reality to this magnificent novel of courage, daring and love.

Audible presents the multigenerational epic Some Sing, Some Cry. Created by Ntozake Shange and Ifa Bayeza, this audiobook takes listeners on a journey through Reconstruction, two world wars, the Harlem renaissance, and Vietnam to modern day America.Some Sing, Some Cry begins at the threshold of one family’s freedom. We meet Betty Mayfield, newly emancipated from Sweet Tamarind, a lush and haunted rice plantation off the Carolina coast.

Leading a small army of slaves, Nat Turner was a man born with a mission: to set the captives free. When words failed, he ignited an uprising that left over 50 whites dead. In the predawn hours of August 22, 1831, Nat Turner stormed into history with a Bible in one hand, brandishing a sword in the other. His rebellion shined a spotlight on slavery and the state of Virginia and divided a nation's trust. Turner himself became a lightning rod for abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and a terror and secret shame for slave owners.

When Bridget McQuarry comes to settle in Primrose Creek, she has nothing to lose; her husband, Mitch, was killed in the Civil War, and she has lost her family farm to ruinous Reconstruction taxes. With her baby son and a sister to care for, Bridget vows to make a new start out West. But when Mitch's best friend reappears in her life, he sparks a forbidden passion she thought was forever buried.

Isolated on an island where two rivers meet, the Lazaretto quarantine hospital is the first stop for immigrants who wish to begin new lives in Philadelphia. The Lazaretto's black live-in staff forge a strong social community, and when one of them receives permission to get married on the island the mood is one of celebration, particularly since the white staff - save the opium-addicted doctor - are given leave for the weekend.

The best-selling author of Voodoo Dreams focuses on two women who loved the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Anna, a free woman of color, was his rescuer, his loving wife and mother to his children. Ottilie Assing, a white German woman, became his intellectual soul mate and mistress. At times, they all lived under the same roof.

Fifteen-year-old Amari witnesses the murder of her family and the destruction of her remote African village. She endures countless humiliations as she is beaten, branded, and forced to board a slave ship. The atrocities continue as she struggles through endless days of backbreaking work and daily degradation on a plantation.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, Margaret Mitchell's great novel of the South is one of the most popular books ever written. Within six months of its publication in 1936, Gone With the Wind had sold a million copies. To date, it has been translated into 25 languages, and more than 28 million copies have been sold. Here are the characters that have become symbols of passion and desire....

Hillary Jordan's mesmerizing debut novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction. A powerful piece of Southern literature, Mudbound takes on prejudice in its myriad forms on a Mississippi Delta farm in 1946. City girl Laura McAllen attempts to raise her family despite questionable decisions made by her husband. Tensions continue to rise when her brother-in-law and the son of a family of sharecroppers both return from WWII as changed men bearing the scars of combat.

In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.

Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and fans alike fell in love with the voice of 99-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the 20th century, when she was 15 and her husband was 50. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.

Marshal Shay McQuillan has a lot on his hands - stagecoach robbers to hunt down, a murdered fiancée to avenge. He certainly doesn't need an identical twin brother he never knew existed turning up out of the blue and telling him what to do. Even less does he want pretty Aislinn Lethaby trying to rescue him from danger. Because, to tell the truth, Aislinn is a sweet distraction from duty whom Shay just can't resist.

The Lady: After her father's accidental death, it was up to young Fancy Cranson to keep her small family together. But to survive in the pristine woodlands of the Pacific Northwest, she had to use her brains or her body. With no other choice, Fancy vowed she'd work herself to the bone before selling herself to any timberman – even one as handsome, virile, and arrogant as Chance Dawson.

Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.