When Miss Julia burst on the scene in her fictional debut, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind, this proper lady of a certain age found her orderly world turned upside down when Hazel Marie Puckett appeared with her nine-year-old son, Little Lloyd, who looked disturbingly similar to Miss Julia's late husband. Now, in Miss Julia Takes Over, with her sharp tongue and iron backbone intact, Miss Julia must tackle another disruption when Hazel Marie doesn't return...

"A gripping contemporary novel that examines the American dream through the lens of two families living side by side in an idyllic neighborhood, and the one summer that changes their lives irrevocably"--

This is the story of two small-town former high school sweethearts from opposite sides of the tracks. Now middle-aged, they have taken wildly divergent paths, but neither has lived the life they imagined, and neither can forget the passionate first love that forever altered their world. When they are both called back to their hometown for the funeral of the mentor who once gave them shelter, they will be forced to confront the choices each has made,...

The lush, secluded mountains of North Carolina's Lake Lure had drawn Lauren Castle into their spell. It was here, in 1938, that Hollywood's most beloved glamour girl, Victoria Frazer, drowned during a scandalous affair with actor Roger Brandt. Few knew about the baby spirited away into the night. That baby was Lauren's mother. It has been two years since Lauren's filmmaker husband died mysteriously at Lake Lure while making a documentary on Roger...

Blinking Jack Stokes was a skinny tenant farmer, and Ruby Pitt Woodrow was "the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry ... They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life."--Pbk. cover.

A full-length account of a Pushcart Prize-winning essay describes the author's experiences as the journalist wife of a Libyan-born Muslim with whom she lives in the American south, a relationship that has endured prejudices and respective views about family and parenting.

Is there really such thing as a lucky charm? The hero of Nicholas Sparks's new novel believes he's found one in the form of a photograph of a smiling woman he's never met, but who he comes to believe holds the key to his destiny. The chain of events that leads to him possessing the photograph and finding the woman pictured in it is the stuff of love stories.

Street-smart and straightforward police chief Cuddy Mangum and his refined homicide detective Justin Savile V are determined to keep their town's cultural, political and racial divisions stable...even peaceful. But when a young black activist is murdered while in the process of fighting for his brother's freedom from death row, the lines keeping Hillston, North Carolina, in balance start to crumble. Thrust into a dirty political campaign and torn...