Novella Carpenter loves cities - the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can't shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents' disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard self-sufficiency, Carpenter decided that it might be possible to have it both ways.

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family; she called herself an "excitement addict."

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at 17. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media.

At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper-middle-class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets.

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and her solitary life.

A loving and devoted step-father, Donnie introduced Tracy Ross's family to the joys of fishing, deer hunting, camping, and hiking among the pristine mountains of rural Idaho. Donnie was everything Tracy dreamed a dad would be: protective, brave, and kind. But when his dependence on his eight-year-old daughter's companionship went too far, everything changed.

Living in the Woods in a Tree is an intimate glimpse into the turbulent life of Texas music legend Blaze Foley (1949-1989), seen through the eyes of Sybil Rosen, the woman for whom he wrote his most widely known song, "If I Could Only Fly". It captures the exuberance of their fleeting idyll in a tree house in the Georgia woods during the countercultural 1970s. Rosen offers a firsthand witnessing of Foley's transformation from a reticent hippie musician to the enigmatic singer/songwriter who would live and die outside society's rules.

For fans of A Street Cat Named Bob and Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, Strays is a compelling true story of a man who rescues a stray, injured cat and how they save each other. Homeless, alcoholic, and depressed, Michael King lives in a UPS loading bay on the wrong side of the tracks in Portland, Oregon. One rainy night, he stumbles upon a hurt, starving, scruffy cat and takes her in.

In Chasing Down the Dawn, recording artist, actress, and best-selling author jewel opens her intimate journals to create a vivid montage of the people, places, and relationships that colored the life she came from and have marked this past magical, turbulent, and ultimately transformational year of her life.

It is 1970. "Bean" Holladay is 12 and her sister, Liz, is 15 when their artistic mother, Charlotte, a woman who flees every place she’s ever lived at the first sign of trouble," takes off to find herself." She leaves her girls enough money for food to last a month or two. But when Bean gets home from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz board a bus from California to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying antebellum mansion that’s been in the family for generations.

When sixteen-year-old Cindra Zoeller is sent to a reform camp in Montana after being involved in an armed robbery, she is thrust into a world of mountains and cowboys and prayers and miscreants and people from all walks of life like she’s never seen in suburban Massachusetts. At Camp Challenge, she becomes transfixed by Lucky, a camp employee of mysterious origin—an origin of constant speculation—and the chemistry between them is instant, and profound. The pair escape together into the wilderness to create an idyllic life far from the reach of the law.

Kachemak Winkel never intended to come back to his hometown of Caboose, Alaska, where his family died in a plane crash 20 years earlier. When he finally musters the courage to return and face his painful memories, he's surprised to find a mysterious young woman living in his abandoned house.

Laurie Zaleski never aspired to run an animal rescue; that was her mother Annie’s dream. But from girlhood, Laurie was determined to make the dream come true. Thirty years later as a successful businesswoman, she did it, buying a 15-acre farm deep in the Pinelands of South Jersey. She was planning to relocate Annie and her caravan of ragtag rescues - horses and goats, dogs and cats, chickens and pigs - when Annie died, just two weeks before moving day. In her heartbreak, Laurie resolved to make her mother’s dream her own.

This is the tale of Amy and her daughter and the people who helped raise them after Amy found herself a reluctant single parent. It is a story of frequent failures and surprising successes, as Amy starts and loses careers, bumbles through blind dates, and travels across the country with her daughter. All roads, though, lead them back to her hometown of Freeville (pop. 458), a tiny village where Amy's family has lived for over 200 years.

Stuck in a job he no longer found fulfilling, journalist Mike McIntyre felt his life was quickly passing him by. So one day he hit the road to trek from one end of the country to the other with little more than the clothes on his back and without a single penny in his pocket. Through his travels, he found varying degrees of kindness in strangers from all walks of life - and discovered more about people and values and life on the road in America than he'd ever thought possible.