There ain’t no culture like an agriculture! Read these stories about the risks and rewards, the joys and sorrows of life on the farm.
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
When the recently orphaned socialite Flora Poste descends on her relatives at the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm in deepest Sussex, she finds a singularly miserable group in dire need of her particular talent: organization.
Count the Ways by Joyce Maynard
Eleanor and Cam meet at a crafts fair in the early 1970s. She’s an artist and writer, he makes wooden bowls. Within four years they are parents to three children. To Eleanor, their New Hampshire farm provides everything she always wanted, until unforeseen challenges threaten that peace. How will their family find redemption?
Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock
After spending her summer running the family farm and training the quarterback for her school’s rival football team, sixteen-year-old D.J. decides to go out for the sport herself, not anticipating the reactions of those around her.
Daughters of the Wild by Natalka Burian
In rural West Virginia, Joanie and her foster siblings live on a farm tending a mysterious plant called the vine. The older girls are responsible for cultivating the vine, performing sacred rituals to make it grow. After Joanie’s arranged marriage goes horribly wrong, leaving her widowed and with a baby, she plots her escape.
Dead on the Vine by Elle Brooke White
Charlotte Finn never wanted to inherit the family’s produce farm—much less plow a heap of money into it. Her plan is to hammer a great big FOR SALE sign into the farm’s fallow furrows—but Charlotte’s sunny hopes of a quick sale succumb to a killing frost when she finds a dead body entwined supine in the tomato vines, run through…with a pitchfork?
An Ill Wind by Pat Miller
Colorado author Miller tells the tale of Emma Cooper, kidnapped from her pioneer life in Missouri and taken to the frontier via the Santa Fe trail. Will she ever see her family again?
My Antonía by Willa Cather
The classic story of European settlement on the tall-grass prairie of the American midwest, with its beautiful yet terrifying landscape, rich ethnic mix of immigrants and native-born Americans, and communities who share life’s joys and sorrows.
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On Brassard’s Farm by Daniel Hecht
In a radical departure from her urban life, Ann Turner buys a piece of remote land and sets up a tent home deep in the forest. She’s trying to escape an unending string of personal disasters in Boston; she desperately wants to leave behind a world she sees as increasingly defined by consumerism, hypocrisy, and division. But she quickly learns that life in the woods is never easy.
Sycamore Promises by Paul Colt
A young couple leaves Ohio for the promise of a new life on the Kansas plains. They settle a prime tract of farmland near Lawrence, Kansas. A second young couple slips the bonds of slavery in Missouri. Circumstance brings them together. Set against the backdrop of a nation divided over the issue of slavery, the young settlers fight to hold their land and realize the future that unites them.
Waiting Season by Melanie Lageschulte
Melinda Foster hoped to spend January relaxing by her farmhouse’s fireplace while paging through the seed catalogs’ promises of spring. Instead, she finds herself struggling to keep the worst of winter’s threats from her door. Shoveling snow, thawing her farm’s water lines, and anxiously watching over the pregnant sheep in her barn fill her shorter days and longer nights.