The author details how he ignored naysayers and was able to bring electricity and running water to his Malawian village when he built a makeshift windmill out of scrap metal and spare parts.

"What’s more important: Knowing the truth or keeping the peace? Seventeen-year-old Avery Anderson is convinced her senior year is ruined when she's uprooted from her life in DC and forced into the hostile home of her terminally ill grandmother, Mama Letty. The tension between Avery’s mom and Mama Letty makes for a frosty arrival and unearths past drama they refuse to talk about. Every time Avery tries to look deeper, she’s turned away, leaving...

What happens when a young sophisticated Chicagoan falls for the owner of a farm on Johns Island, a lush Lowcountry paradise off the coast of South Carolina -- trading the bustle of a cosmopolitan city for the vagaries of a small southern town?

A chronicle based on four years of reporting follows five teenage girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard--Washington County, Maine. Washington County, Maine. Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie are teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region. For four years Georges followed their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times:...

A bold debut novel weaves a coming-of-age story into the gritty lives and desolate beauty of Vermont's northeast kingdom.

"Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still...

On a poor farm near Starkfield in western Massachusetts, Ethan Frome struggles to wrest a living from the land, unassisted by his whining and hypochondrialcal wife Zeena. When Zeena's young cousin Mattie Silver is left destitute, and only place she can go is Ethan's farm. An embittered and man and an enchanting young woman meeting in such circumstances unleash predictable consequences as passions are aroused between the three protagonists

The story of a degraded, poor-white Georgia family living in a tumble-down shack on worn out land. This land had once been the prosperous tobacco plantation of Jeeter Lester's grandfather.

"Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her kind, her skin the color of a blue damselfly in these dusty hills. But that doesn't mean she's got nothing to offer. As a member of the Pack Horse Library Project, Cussy delivers books to the hill folk of Troublesome, hoping to spread learning in these desperate times. But not everyone is so keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and the hardscrabble Kentuckians are quick to blame a Blue for any trouble...

"Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There{8217}s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can{8217}t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi{173}cial blood he pours on his prayer log. There{8217}s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife...