Helen Plum Library

"Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It's locked at all times. Because when the trunk is opened, people around her start to disappear... The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, and forced her to flee her hometown of Redondo, California, in a hellfire rush, ready to make her way to Montana as a homesteader. Dragging the trunk with her at every stop, she will be one of...

Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential literary works. It features literary phenomena with influence and themes so great that, after their publication, they changed literature forever. From the musings of literary geniuses like Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the striking personal narrative of Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, this new series is a comprehensive collection...

My Ántonia, first published 1918, is one of Willa Cather's greatest works. It is the last novel in the Prairie trilogy, preceded by O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark. My Ántonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Ántonia. The book's narrator,

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Based on an actual historical event, this is the story of May Dodd—a remarkable woman who, in 1875, travels through the American West to marry the chief of the Cheyenne Nation.One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd's journey into an unknown world. Having been committed to an insane asylum by her blue-blood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope for freedom and redemption is to participate

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History is thick with secrets in The Sugar Camp Quilt, seventh in the beloved Elm Creek Quilts series from bestselling author Jennifer Chiaverini. Set in Creek's Crossing, Pennsylvania, in the years leading up to the Civil War, the novel follows Dorothea Granger's passage from innocence to wisdom against the harrowing backdrop of the American struggle over slavery. She discovers that a quilt she has stitched for her uncle Jacob with five unusual patterns...

When Sierra finds a journal by one of her ancestors, she begins to explore the young woman's life and rediscovers her own spirituality

"Minnesota, 1862: As a woman fleeing from a dark and secret past, Sarah Wakefield leaves Rhode Island quietly and quickly under cover of night for the long journey to Minnesota where she has been advised there is good work to be had. She soon finds a husband who becomes a resident physician for a Sioux town there but the political backdrop of that moment is volatile: white settlers are breaking treaties, Native American land is shrinking, and mass...

She's cared for her siblings as best she could . . . but is it enough? Instead of the new life she and her family expected to forge out west, seventeen-year-old Angela is thrust into the role of caring for her three younger siblings after the death of their parents. With the help of her older brother, and trust in God, Angela is determined to raise the children as her mother would have wanted. As the youngsters grow, the questions and challenges intensify....

When Beth Thatcher returns to Coal Valley, she has much to be excited about. She anticipates Jarrick's proposal of marriage and perhaps a spring wedding. The mine is expanding, and there are more schoolchildren than ever. But the town's rapid growth brings many challenges. A second teacher is assigned, and Beth finds herself going head-to-head with a very different philosophy of education--one that dismisses religion and rejects God. Fearful for the...

Young Emma Wagner chafes at the constraints of Bethel colony, an 1850s religious community in Missouri that is determined to remain untainted by the concerns of the world. A passionate and independent thinker, she resents the limitations placed on women, who are expected to serve in quiet submission. In a community where dissent of any form is discouraged, Emma finds it difficult to rein in her tongue, and often doesn't even try to do so. This fuels...