Jane Smiley

"Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start appearing outside of town, a darkness descends that she can't resist confronting. Side by side with her friend...

In 1953, the Langdon family at a crossroads. Their stalwart patriarch, Walter, who with his wife, Rosanna, sustained their farm for three decades, has suddenly died, leaving their five children, now adults, looking to the future. Only one will remain in Iowa to work the land, while the others scatter to Washington, D.C., California, and everywhere in between. As the country moves out of post-World War II optimism through the darker landscape of the...

"Perestroika in Paris is an imaginative story of three extraordinary animals--and a young boy--whose lives intersect in Paris. Parasis a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. One afternoon she pushes open the door of her stall--she's a curious filly--and, after traveling through the night, arrives by chance in the City of Light. She's dazzled, and often mystified,by the sights, sounds and smells around her, but she isn't afraid. Soon she...

Seventh-grader Abby Lovitt grows up on her family's California horse ranch in the 1960s, learning to train the horses her father sells and trying to reconcile her strict religious upbringing with her own ideas about life.