"In the spirit of The Bartender's Tale, a lively and poignant coming-of-age story about a boy and his great-uncle on a cross-country odyssey. Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Doig's beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old's imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for "female trouble" in the summer of 1951, all she...

"In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is...

"Go back to high school with Pink Lady Sandy, leader of the bad-boy T-Birds Danny, and a rockin' and rollin' all-star cast." --

Reconnecting with a vibrant woman from his past, Philip is shocked to learn that her seemingly charmed marriage ended in divorce and tragedy and that the woman regarded her ex as a monster, a revelation that compels him to investigate the truth.

What impact can American history have on the life of the vulnerable individual? It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working...

In 1950s Iowa, a murder-suicide forces a lawyer to put aside his rock-and-roll grief Sam McCain loves Buddy Holly because he's the only rock-and-roll star who still seems like a dweeb, and Sam knows how that feels. With the unrequited love of his life at his side, Sam drives more than three hours through the snow to watch his idol play the Surf Ballroom. That night, Buddy Holly dies in the most famous plane crash in music history, but Sam has no time...

In 1953, Michael heads south to become a man in the U.S. Navy. He is naive about the sadistic terrors of the service, the bigotry of the south, and thrashes through with frustration and despair until he meets Eden Santana.

"Following the death of their mother from a botched backwoods abortion, the McAlister daughters have to cope with the ripple effect of this tragedy as they come of age in 1950s Mississippi and then grow up to face their own impossible choices--an unforgettable, beautiful novel that is threaded throughout with the stories of mothers and daughters in pre-Roe versus Wade America. Life heads down back alleys, takes sharp left turns. Then, one fine day...

The Operator by Gretchen Berg delivers a vivid look inside the heads and hearts of a group of housewives and pokes at the absurdities of 1950s America, a simpler time that was far from simple. In a small town, everyone knows everyone else's business... Nobody knows the people of Wooster, Ohio, better than switchboard operator Vivian Dalton, and she'd be the first to tell you that. She calls it intuition. Her teenage daughter, Charlotte, calls it eavesdropping....

"On a cold Sunday evening in early 1957, Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron gas station for the dragon he'd hired to help on the farm... Sarah Dewhurst and her father, outcasts in their little town of Frome, Washington, are forced to hire a dragon to work their farm, something only the poorest of the poor ever have to resort to. The dragon, Kazimir, has more to him than meets the eye, though. Sarah can't help but...