Showing results for "Charity" in Literary Fiction

The friendship between Lena Kaiser, a sodbuster's daughter, and Gustie Roemer, an educated Easterner, is unlikely in any other circumstance but post-frontier Charity, South Dakota. Gustie is considered an outsider, and Lena is too proud to share her problems (which include a hard-drinking husband) with anyone else.

Lena, a young mother living on the edge of heartbreak. Her sister-in-law, Mary, more beautiful than loved. Alvinia, midwife to the county and mother of ten. Gustie and Jordis, trying to make a home together but finding their place on either the reservation or in Charity precarious. The women come together in the face of natural hardships—childbirth, disastrous weather, and disease—and the unnatural malevolence of people who mean them harm. In the end, they find themselves bound by a secret none of them could have predicted.

Livia Denby is on trial for attempted murder. The jury have reached a verdict. Two years earlier, Livia was a probation officer in Yorkshire, her husband Scott a teacher. Their children, Heidi and Noah, round out a happy family until the day Scott's brother dies. Grief and guilt leave Scott seeking answers, a search which takes him into the world of conspiracy theories. As his grip on reality slides, he makes a decision which will put the family on a collision course with tragedy.