As the nation readies to enter WWII, Tink Buchanan has one concern: his personal battle to regain the land, and home, that are his birthright. A generation earlier the Ogilvies had forced his father to turn over the land to cover a debt, and with the Depression grinding on, Tink sees his change to return the favor - if he can only dredge up a bit more cash. So he pulls his son, Carter, out of college to work in his lumber mill and sets his eyes on going home. But Tink's plan unravels when Carter's affection for Julia Ogilvie threatens family ties - and as racial tensions mount following the brutal murder of his employee, Saint MacGrue. 
Set in the swamplands and tobacco fields of Laureate, Florida, and born out of the gritty Southern literary tradition of hard knocks and rough lives, A Tinker's Damn is a story of redemption, and the blurred distinction between the two.

A Tinker's Damn

Wimberley, Darryl

Literature & Fiction

MacMurray & Beck

We are a nation of consumers. But where does what we buy come from? And how are these things made? In this meditation on manufacture, Susan Neville journeys to factories and plants in the heart of Indiana, looking for the sources of things. 
 From these journeys, Neville learns how the process of canning tomatoes is similar to the process of making metal caskets. Watches thousands of blue globes spin through a room like planets. Learns how, and by whom, and how well, and why things are made, whether they be dolls or insulin, gyroscopes or glass. And, by focusing on process and production, Neville gives us new, uncommon perspectives from which to view our world, and ourselves.

Fabrication : Essays on making things and making meaning

Neville, Susan

Essays & Correspondence

It is 1945, and in a rural Irish village called Creevagh, a young man waits eagerly for the mail, convinced that one letter will bring his salvation. Since the age of reason, Phelim O'Brien has been obsessed by a morbid fear of hell; and from the age of puberty, tormented by the certainty he'll wind up there. But his friend, Philpot Emmett, refuses to accept that the slightest tittle of carnal pleasure is a mortal sin, and where Phelim struggles, Philpot happily yields. Father Coyne admonishes, Catherine Ryan tempts, and the formidable Maura Higgins rebels against them all, vanguard of the encroaching modern values that are slowly changing the face of village life. This is an this endearing and sweetly funny first novel, by an engaging and talented new writer.

Celibates and Other Lovers

Keady, Walter

United States

In this brilliantly comic first novel, a solitary and articulate outsider walks the quiet streets of a small midwestern town, making himself up from fragments of Latin poems, shards of ancient thought, and a few scattered appearances before the county clerk. And the townsfolk are understandably suspiciousespecially when this man who calls himself Horace starts making random Socratic phone calls at all hours and turning up half-dressed every time there's trouble. Following in the literary footsteps of Walker Percy, Frederick Reuss charms us with the musings, vices, and brief encounters of a reluctant humanist who ingeniously challenges a broad American complacency with a charmingly specific search for meaning: What do you think of St. Bernards?

Horace Afoot

Reuss, Frederick

Joseph Carl Taft is a boy with a distinguished name and a remarkable ability -- he can see into the future. But his ability is a heavy burden to bear, especially for a boy who cannot speak. The knowledge that sends him careening toward the inevitable is also the knowledge that feeds his incredible affection for those he loves. But Semaphore is about more than language and the ability to move beyond one's own time. It's about the timelessness and transcendence of love; about the connectedness of things and how to hold that sacred. Beautifully written, emotionally taut, this is an achingly brilliant debut.

Semaphore

Hawkes, G. W.

After her father's death, Sister Mary Thomas leaves her convent to reclaim the family farm in the Irish village of Creevagh. In 1950, her status as ex-nun scandalizes the women of the village, but her beauty, strength, willfulness, and wit attract every eligible male.

Mary McGreevy

The Freshour Cylinders

WINNER OF THE 1999 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD
Tom Freshour needs a vacation. It's the dusty, hot summer of 1934, and he'd like to escape both the heat in western Arkansas and his cases at the county prosecutor's office for the calm and solitude of a fishing trip. But his old Ford won't start, and while it's being repaired, an eccentric and enigmatic collector of Indian artifacts is brutally murdered.
It doesn't help matters that the executor of the collector's estate is Rainy Davis, a beautiful, intelligent young archaeologist who's uncertain why she was appointed to oversee the estate of a man whom she'd met only once.
Nor does it help that the most formidable county judge has asked personally that Freshour take the case.
But Freshour agrees, drawing himself into a tense and violent investigation of murder, political scandal, and some very private affairs.
In this suspenseful literary mystery, Speer Morgan takes us back to the events surrounding the discovery and destruction of the Spiro Mound, the most significant pre-Columbian temple mound ever found in North America. Weaving history with the compelling story of murder, broken hearts, and greed, Morgan gives us one of the most engrossing, sexy, and suspenseful reads of the year.

Morgan, Speer

When Kate Banner, an American midwife in Nicaragua, loses another patient - a young woman who had recently given birth - she decides it is time to go home, because to care for the children of war you have to cut off pieces of your heart. Her travels home lead her to Guatemala where she again encounters the innocent victims of a country's war. Hummingbird House is a devastatingly powerful and emotionally trustworthy story of a human heart unbinding itself in the most unjust of worlds.

Hummingbird House

Henley, Patricia

Winner of The Age Book of the Year in Australia, Three Dollars is about Eddie, an honest, compassionate man who finds himself, at the age of thirty-eight, with a wife, a child, and three dollars. At any other time the world would have smiled on him. But this is the nineties and the world values other things. A brilliantly deft and poignant portrait of a man attempting to retain his humanity, his family, and his sense of humor in a corporate world.

Three Dollars

PERLMAN, Elliot

Humor & Satire

Following his much-celebrated debut, Horace Afoot, Frederick Reuss returns with another endearing hero. This time it's a six-year-old Gnostic with a photographic memory. Henry is being reared - at least intermittently - by gamblers, thieves, whores, and priests in one of America's most notorious sin cities. But from time to time, he seems to believe that he's living as a saint in fifth century Byzantium. As in Horace Afoot, Frederick Reuss's new novel describes the labyrinthine terrain in which we shape our identities and search for meaning. And like Horace, young henry places his questions into a distant and possibly wiser world. For some reason, the stories of ancient Byzantium help henry make sense of his absurd - and sometimes dangerous - existence. Henry of Atlantic City is an ironic, funny, and heart rending account of the ways we become our own saviors by choosing what to believe.

Henry of Atlantic City

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