"Country businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical reasons. Reply by letter."
Rural Wisconsin in 1907, and Ralph Truitt waits on the station platform for the woman who has answered his advertisement, but as Robert Goolrick shows in A Reliable Wife, "a gothic tale of smouldering desire", Catherine is not the 'simple honest' woman Ralph is expecting, and he in turn is more than she bargained for!
Next a book set in Korea and spanning thirty years from 1915 and Japanese occupation, Eugenia Kim's The Calligrapher's Daughter is about the end of dynastic culture, ancient customs and modern possibilities and a young girl who wishes to choose her own destiny.
This first novel based on the life of the author's mother is getting strongly positive reviews.
Now a book set in an Alabama coal-mining town in 1931. Nine-year-old Tess sees a strange woman lift the cover off the family well and toss in a baby without a word.
"Subtle ... and moving", The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips was first published by a small press in Oregon, then a year later it won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize (previous winners of which include Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Monica Ali's Brick Lane). I'm looking forward to reading it.
