Appalachian Culture

For a curious boy like Jess Hall, growing up in Marshall means trouble when you get caught spying on grown-ups. Adventurous and precocious, Jess is protective of his older brother, Christopher, a mute whom everyone calls Stump. Though their mother has warned them not to snoop, Stump can't help sneaking a look at something he's not supposed to—an act that will have repercussions. It's a wrenching event that thrusts Jess into an adulthood for which he's not prepared.

This novel describes the experiences of a young boy growing up in North Carolina in the 1940s.

Discovering Analees Williamsburg, a fifteen-year-old runaway slave in 1810, August King faces a moral dilemma in which he must decide between turning the girl in for a reward or risking his life to help her.

The hero of Charles Frazier's first novel is Inman, a disillusioned Confederate soldier who has failed to die as expected after being seriously wounded in battle during the last days of the Civil War. Rather than waiting to be redeployed to the front, the soul-sick Inman deserts, and embarks on a dangerous and lonely odyssey through the devastated South, heading home to North Carolina and seeking only to be reunited with his beloved, Ada, who has herself been struggling to maintain the family farm she inherited.

Ginny, who marries Tom at the turn of the century after her family has given up on her ever marrying, narrates the story of their life together on her father's farm in the western North Carolina mountains. They have a lot in common--love of the land and fathers who fought in the Civil War. Their marriage is mutually beneficial in purely practical terms. What keeps getting in the way of their love, though, are their obsessions.

This is the story of revenge, mountain style. It is not a mystery in the truest sense of the word and it is not a love story, but it has elements of both. The rugged and individualistic people of the Blue Ridge mountains will wait patiently for the courts to mete out justice, but if that justice is too slow in coming, or if justice should miscarry because of slick lawyers and poor laws, then a vaccum is created--in time, every vacuum must be filled.

When a twelve-year-old girl drowns in the Tamassee River and her body is trapped in a deep eddy, the people of the small South Carolina town that bears the river's name are thrown into the national spotlight. The girl's parents want to attempt a rescue of the body; environmentalists are convinced the rescue operation will cause permanent damage to the river and set a dangerous precedent. Torn between the two sides is Maggie Glenn, a twenty-eight-year-old newspaper photographer who grew up in the town and has been sent to document the incident.