Donna Everhart

During the Great Depression, labor camps crop up in remote areas throughout the American South. Destitute workers live under terrible conditions. Trapped in these isolated locations, workers are entirely dependent on the often greedy, abusive camp owners....

On a brisk February morning while walking to work, Ruth Foster is stopped by the local sheriff. He insists she accompany him to a health clinic, threatening to arrest her if she doesn't undergo testing in order to preserve decency and prevent the spread of sexual disease.

For twelve-year-old Martha "Sonny" Creech, there is no place more beautiful than her family's cotton farm. When a tragic accident claims her father's life, her stricken family struggles to fend off ruin - until their rich, reclusive neighbor offers to help finance that year's cotton crop....

Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser's daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she's concerned, moonshine caused her mother's death....

Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and eleven-year-old Robert, on their small subsistence farm....