Never in a million years did Lauren Greenwood think she would be destitute and without a penny to her name. But when her father mercilessly disowns her in the depths of winter, that is her fate. Now homeless, Lauren finds America in the devastating grip of the Great Depression--children run wild in the icy streets, endless queues for soup kitchens line frosty sidewalks, and desperation hangs in the air. All alone in the world, Lauren finds an orphanage...

During the Depression, a rural black family deeply attached to the forest on their land tries to save it from being cut down by an unscrupulous white man.

"Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary -- something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt...

"Miss Layla Beck, the daughter of a powerful Senator from Delaware refuses to marry the gentleman her father has chosen for her and is forced to get a job working for the FWP to write the first official account of Maecdonian History. Her notions of real life--the social whirl of Newport and New York--are totally upended and she despairs in rooming with the overly eccentric Romeyn family in such a small backwater town. The Romeyn family is a fixture...

"In 1937 Montana, fourteen-year-old Houston "Huck" Finn finds a dead body in a local creek and steals the man's rare Lindbergh flight watch. Huck is an aspiring aviator, working to build his own airplane-a secret he has kept from his God-fearing mother. His cousin, Annelise, arrives from Los Angeles for a long stay with his family, and Huck is initially wary until he learns she has had flight lessons. As his airplane takes shape, and the young cousins...

Cotton County, Georgia, 1930. Two babies-- one light-skinned, the other dark-- are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her mercurial father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper. But the ties that...

When Arlen Wagner awakens on a train one hot Florida night and sees death's telltale sign in the eyes of his fellow passengers, he tries to warn them. Only 19-year-old Paul Brickhill believes him, and the two abandon the train, hoping to escape certain death. They continue south, but are soon stranded at the Cypress House--an isolated Gulf Coast boarding house run by the beautiful Rebecca Cady--directly in the path of an approaching hurricane. But...