Charles Frazier, the author of National Book Award winning Cold Mountain, presents a new novel. In Nightwoods, Frazier envisions a late 1950s North Carolina through the eyes of Luce, a single woman who must care for the quiet twins of her murdered sister, Lily.

"The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds -- Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s -- and whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century's most tumultuous events"--Provided by publisher.

The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains-but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Together this lord and lady of...

In 1939 North Carolina, an all-Black baseball team "trespasses" on the whites-only baseball field, and the resulting racial outrage can only be resolved on the mound.

In 1961 Charlotte, North Carolina, the predominantly black neighborhood of Brooklyn is a bustling city within a city. Self-contained and vibrant, it has its own restaurants, schools, theaters, churches, and night clubs. There are shotgun shacks and poverty, along with well-maintained houses like the one Loraylee Hawkins shares with her young son, Hawk, her Uncle Ray, and her grandmother, Bibi. Loraylee's love for Archibald Griffin, Hawk's white father...

1976. In the still-segregated town of West Mills, North Carolina in 1976, three siblings-- Marian, Marva, and Lazarus Harmon-- are found shot to death in their home. It creates a frenzy of finger-pointing, gossip, and wonder: the first reported murder in the area in decades-- but white authorities don't seem to care or have any interest in solving the case. Ms. Jo Wright has just moved back to West Mills from New York City to retire and marry a childhood...

Square, North Carolina. When her uncle, Buddy Bush moves back home from Harlem, it seems like a breath of northern freedom has come with him. But since Buddy doesn't bow to white folks any more, soon he is jail, with the Klan at the cell door. Through Pattie Mae's innocent eyes, life in the deeply segregated South unfolds as she tells of the birth of a legend.

At her grandparents' North Carolina mountain home during the summer of 1963, eleven-year-old Annie Winters, grief-stricken by the death of her newborn sister and isolated by her mother's deepening depression, finds comfort in holding an oblong stone "rock baby" and in the friendship of a neighbor boy and a reclusive mountain woman with a devastating secret.