In the fictional New England town of Starkfield, an unnamed narrator is forced to stay at the home of Ethan Frome during a winter storm. He relates his encounter with Frome, "the most striking figure in Starkfield, he was but the ruin of a man, with a careless powerful look - in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain". When the beautiful cousin of Frome's bitter wife comes to help with housekeeping, Frome's attraction to
This "is the sunniest and least brooding of Hardy's great novels. The strong-minded Bathsheba Everdene--and the devoted shepherd, obsessed farmer, and dashing soldier who vie for her favor--move through a late nineteenth-century agrarian landscape, still almost untouched by the Industrial Revolution and the encroachment of modern life"--Amazon.com.
Lewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm--sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors--farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers--are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress. Nevertheless, the twins' world--a few square miles of countryside--is...
Relocating to her aunt and uncle's farm after the death of a beloved grandmother in 1955, Tessa offers guidance to a bad-tempered disabled girl and pursues a promising romance with the girl's father that is challenged by unexpected heartache. By the author of When the Bough Breaks.