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"His life had come to this: save a few deer from the jaws of dogs. He was a small man sent to perform a small task." Howard Elman is a man whose internal landscape is as disordered as his front yard, where native New Hampshire birches and maples mingle with a bullet-riddled washer, abandoned bathroom fixtures, and several junk cars. Howard, anti-hero of this first novel in Ernest Hebert's highly acclaimed Darby Chronicles, is a man who is tough and tender. Howard's battle against encroaching change symbolizes the class conflict between indigenous Granite Staters scratching out a living and citified immigrants with "college degrees and big bank accounts." Like the winter-weakened deer threate...
A long-awaited new novel set in the period of the French and Indian Wars brings a new dimension to the region's history
Jack Landry, a promising high school baseball player, and his best friend, Elphege Beaupre, live by the motto 'Never back down, never instigate'. It's a rule of stubborn passivity that Jack will follow to the end of his days. Unconsciously burdened by his heritage, the church, and a life of hard work, young Jack still has big dreams.
"You stay in your hometown, you end up more of a stranger than if you'd started new someplace else." The struggle between the indigenous rural working class and the upper crust intensifies in this turning-point novel of the Darby Chronicles as Freddy Elman, son of the town trash collector, and Lilith Salmon, daughter of a prestigious family, embark on their ill-fated love affair. Seeing Darby through new eyes, Freddy comes to realize that "the kind of people who hunkered down among these tree-infested, rock-strewn hills" is "dying out, replaced by people with money, education, culture, people 'wise in the ways of the world.'" As that world increasingly intervenes, the lovers' attempt to bridge the chasm that divides their class-alienated families inevitably collapses. This is a book for anyone interested in local politics, privilege, and poverty, all embedded in a story of love and death in the woods and on the ledges of the Granite State.
Making the case for the working man
Web Clements, thirteen, escapes from a swamp in rural New Hampshire with no memory of his past, and finds himself in a confusing world of virtual reality, wars produced for television, computerized restaurants, and lifelike holograms
Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger and policeman in a bleak New Hampshire town, he is a former high-school star gone to beer fat, a loner with a mean streak. It is a mark of Russell Banks' artistry and understanding that Wade comes to loom in one's mind as a blue-collar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition. Told by his articulate, equally scarred younger brother, Wade's story becomes as spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to the dynamite.
Panhead is an exploration of hill farm life in Vermont in the sixties. Paul and Glenda are growing up on a small hill farm. Their lives change when they leave for college and change yet again when Paul returns home to help his father keep the farm. Paul's trip home raises the question of when life is worth living and when it stops being so.
This is the story of Marcus: bonded out of jail where he has been awaiting trial for murder, he is sent to the Hebert plantation to work in the fields. There he encounters conflict with the overseer, Sidney Bonbon, and a tale of revenge, lust and power plays out between Marcus, Bonbon, BonBon's mistress Pauline, and BonBon's wife Louise.
A novel of Colonial Rhode Island and its vibrant early African American life and culture.