“A graceful, intelligent, and very funny chronicle of a large, extended family beneath one capacious roof.” –The New York Times Book Review While always well-stocked with clean sheets, Lily Hill is not expecting visitors. At least not in the numbers that descend upon her genteely dilapidated New England ancestral home in the summer of ’89. Brother Harvey arrives first, thrice-widowed and eager for company; then perennially self-dramatizing niece Ginger and her teenaged daughter Betsy; then Alden, just laid-off from Wall Street, with his wife Becky, and their rowdy brood of four . . . As summer fades into fall, it becomes clear that no one intends to leave. But just as Lily’s industrious hospitality gives way to a somewhat strained domestic routine, the Hill clan must face new challenges together. Brimming with wit and a compendium of Yankee curiosities, The Hills at Home is an irresistible modern take on an old-fashioned comedy of manners.

To most outsiders, the hills of the Scottish Borders are a bleak and foreboding space - usually made to represent the stigmatized Other, Ad Finis, by the centers of power in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. At a time when globalization seems to threaten our sense of place, people of the Scottish borderlands provide a vivid case study of how the being-in-place is central to the sense of self and identity. Since the end of the thirteenth century, people living in the Scottish Border hills have engaged in armed raiding on the frontier with England, developed capitalist sheep farming in the newly united kingdom of Great Britain, and are struggling to maintain their family farms in one of the marginal agricultural rural regions of the European Community. Throughout their history, sheep farmers living in these hills have established an abiding sense of place in which family and farm have become refractions of each other. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this book concentrates on the contemporary farming practices - shepherding, selling lambs and rams at auctions - as well as family and class relations through which hill sheep fuse people, place, and way of life to create this sense of being-at-home in the hills.

One of more than twenty-five first cousins who grew up together in the Ozark Mountains, Marilyn Michel Whetstone reveals in Our Home in the Hills how she experienced first-hand the joy and comfort of being part of a large, close-knit family. In a collection of true stories and family recipes, Whetstone shares anecdotes that provide insight into her life growing up in the popular resort mecca of the Midwest, Rockaway Beach, during the 1950’s and 1960’s and the lives of guests who visited the family resort during that time. While transporting others on a nostalgic trip back to a simpler time, Whetstone details how unselfish acts of sacrifice and kindness promoted healthy and lasting bonds among relatives and friends. She shares the ups and downs in her teenage relationships and offers a glimpse into her close walk with Jesus Christ. Included are recipes that have been passed down in her family for more than a hundred years, providing a backdrop to her delightful stories. “These inspired stories of faith, family, friends, and community will touch your heart. They evoke memories of the joy and blessing of my own growing up years in Ozark Mountain Country.” —Edd Akers, Mayor, City of Branson

It?s been two years since fifteen-year-old Roberto was kidnapped and forced to work in a German labor camp. After finally escaping, he?s made his way back to Italy. Roberto is desperate to return to the safety of his family, but how can he turn his back on the war while so many people are suffering? Roberto joins the resistance movement, and smuggles guns and secret information to rebel fighters. Every mission takes him closer to home, but every mission is even more dangerous than the last. Will Roberto survive and make his way home?

Glory Boughton has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with torment and pain. A troubled boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. He is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Reverend Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, beguiling, lovable and wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with John Ames, his godfather and namesake. Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is arguably Marilynne Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

To uncover the truth, she'll have to break the code of the hills … In the Missouri Ozarks, some things aren't talked about … even abuse. But prosecutor Elsie Arnold is determined to change that. When she is assigned to prosecute a high-profile incest case in which a father is accused of abusing his three young daughters, Elsie is ready to become the Ozarks' avenging angel. But as Elsie sinks her teeth into the case, everything begins to turn sour. The star witness goes missing; the girls refuse to talk about their father, who terrorizes the courtroom from the moment he enters; and Elsie begins to suspect that their tough-as-nails mother has ulterior motives. To make matters worse, Elsie receives gruesome threats from local extremists, warning her to mind her own business. While Elsie swears not to let a sex offender walk, she realizes the odds—and maybe the town—are against her, and her life begins to crumble. But amidst all of the conflict, the safety of three young girls hangs in the balance ... A powerful debut, with the haunting atmosphere of Winter's Bone and the page-turning suspense of Alafair Burke's thrillers.

Bestselling author and renowned presidential campaign adviser (Bill Clinton, Dick Gephardt, Jerry Brown, Gary Hart) David Mixner returns with his first book in 10 years. In At Home with Myself, Mixner writes from and about his country home in Turkey Hollow, an upstate New York town so small and remote that it has just 10 residents, there's no cable TV, the nearest airport is a three hour drive, and deer and bear are his closest neighbors. However, these bucolic surroundings provide an ideal setting for observation and reflection. Drawing on his considerable talents as a storyteller in the tradition on Garrison Keillor and Will Rogers, Mixner chronicles his return to nature at the age of 60. No longer willing to do the things young people do and having lost most of his closet friends to AIDS, he felt out of place in the big cities and "gay mecccas" that had been his home all his adult life. So he chose a mountainside home as a retreat from the busy world, a place of meditation on the small, daily wonders of pastoral life, including the beauty of nature and its constant evolution. Observing the arrival of spring's new blossoms or the sudden appearance of new born animals (while speaking to life's daily events) Mixner writes as Thoreau might have had he been gay. However, At Home with Myself is also a look back on an illustrious 40 year career of protest and politics, including his involvement and leadership in the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the gay and lesbian rights movement, and high-powered presidential politics. In looking at both his--and America's--past and present, Mixner bridges today's world of openly gay elected officials and an African American US president that he and countless other activists fought to build over the past half century and the difficult but exhilarating road traveled to get here.