Court-appointed lawyer Jake Brigance puts his career, his financial security, and the safety of his family on the line to defend a sixteen-year-old suspect who is accused of killing a local deputy and facing the death penalty.

Ray Atlee is a professor of law, he's forty-three, newly single, and still enduring the aftershocks of a surprise divorce. He has a younger brother, Forrest, who redefines the notion of a family's black sheep. His father, Judge Atlee, has become a recluse. With the end in sight, he issues a summons for both sons to return home to Clanton, to discuss the details of his estate.

Carter Crossing, Mississippi. 1997. A lonely railroad track. A crime scene. A coverup. A young woman is dead, and solid evidence points to a soldier at a nearby military base. But that soldier has powerful friends in Washington. Reacher is ordered undercover--to find out everything he can, to control the local police, and then to vanish.

Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946. he rose early, drove into town, walked into the church, and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell. As if the murder wasn't shocking enough, it was even more baffling that Pete's only statement about it - to the sheriff, to his...

"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.

The tiny town of Parrish, MS, isn't exactly welcoming wild child Sugar Beth Carey home with open arms. Nobody has forgotten the former town princess's selfish and demanding ways or the fact that she had a teacher fired in a bid for her millionaire father's attention. Sugar's penniless return is made worse by her discovery that her former enemies seem to be enjoying the fruits of her old life: Her half-sister has married Sugar Beth's high school

...

When a judge returns a shocking verdict against a chemical company accused of dumping toxic waste in a small Mississippi town, the company's billionaire owner seeks to influence the appeal process by using his money to "buy" a seat on the state Supreme Court.

Struggling with family problems and still living in a FEMA trailer years after Hurricane Katrina, lesbian teenager Ramona welcomes the return of her childhood friend Freddie but her shifting feelings for him cause her to question her sexual identity.

In 1946 Clanton, Mississippi, World War II hero Pete Banning calmly and inexplicably kills his pastor and friend, the Reverend Dexter Bell, and refuses to defend his actions during the subsequent trial.