A powerful novel about the indelible effects of war and the memories which stir beneath the silence of a quiet Croatian town, from Orange Prize-shortlisted and Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning author Aminatta Forna 'Supremely masterful' INDEPENDENT 'The Hired Man seals her reputation as arguably the best writer of fiction in this field' EVENING STANDARD 'Terrific skill and insight' DAILY MAIL Gost is surrounded by mountains and fields of wild flowers. The summer sun burns. The Croatian winter brings freezing winds. Beyond the boundaries of the town an old house which has lain empty for years is showing signs of life. One of the windows, glass darkened with dirt, today stands open, and the lively chatter of English voices carries across the fallow fields. Laura and her teenage children have arrived. A short distance away lies the hut of Duro Kolak, who lives alone with his two hunting dogs. As he helps Laura with repairs to the old house, they uncover a mosaic beneath the ruined plaster and, in the rising heat of summer, painstakingly restore it. But Gost is not all it seems; conflicts long past still suppurate beneath the scars.

A drifter finds a place to call home in “a sweet, heartwarming traditional western romance with delightful prose and well-developed characters” (RT Book Reviews). Cordell Winterman is haunted by his mistakes—and the years spent paying for them. Broke and hungry, he takes a job as a hired man on Eleanor Malloy’s farm. Eleanor needs help. Desperately. Her kids are running wild and the place is held up by spit and rust. But as Cord helps her set her home to rights, Eleanor realizes she doesn’t just need this enigmatic drifter with hunger in his eyes . . . she wants him, too!

Set in Cumbria and covering the period from 1898 to the early twenties, this is the powerful saga of John Tallentire, first farm labourer, then coal miner, and his wife Emily. John's struggle to break free from the humiliating status of a 'hired man' is the theme of a novel which has been hailed as a classic of its kind - as meticulously detailed as a social document, as evocative as the writings of Hardy and Lawrence.

When private investigator Dick Hardesty is hired by businessman Stuart Anderson to conduct routine background checks on potential store managers, he becomes reacquainted with a former trick, Phil Stark, who has undergone an amazing transformation from bar hustler to professional escort. When Anderson is murdered, Hardesty is hired by the escort services owners, Arnold and Iris Glick, to keep Phil and the agency away from police scrutiny. Two subsequent murders make this impossible, and Hardesty embarks on a mission to find the identity of the killer.

A Study Guide for Robert Frost's "The Death of the Hired Man," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

"Wise old Vergil says in one of his Georgics, 'Praise large farms, stick to small ones,'" Robert Frost said. "Twenty acres are just about enough." Frost started out as a school teacher living the rural life of a would-be farmer, and later turned to farming full time when he bought a place of his own. After a sojourn in England where his first two books were published to critical acclaim, he returned to New England, acquired a new farm and became a rustic for much of the rest of his life. Frost claimed that all of his poetry was farm poetry. His deep admiration for Virgil's Georgics, or poems of rural life, inspired the creation of his own New England "georgics," his answer to the haughty 20th-century modernism that seemed certain to define the future of Western poetry. Like the "West-Running Brook" in his poem of the same name, Frost's poetry can be seen as an embodiment of contrariness.

Meet the Jennings family: three generationsgrandfather, father, and sonall of them writers. Here are examples of their work in verse and prose spanning nearly a hundred years, from the early 1900s to the start of the 21st Century. Their differences and similarities, their interests and concerns, their hopes and dreams reveal much about the different Americas they were each born into and the different worlds they encountered, imagined, and described. This unique anthology traces the evolution of writing talent in one family across a century of change backgroundsfrom the farmlands of Ohio, to the closing of the Western frontier, and from contemporary faith and science to speculative visions of alternative tomorrows and infinity itself.

Up to now, there has been no complete English-language version of the Russian folktales of A. N. Afanas’ev. This translation is based on L. G. Barag and N. V. Novikov’s edition, widely regarded as the authoritative Russian-language edition. The present edition includes commentaries to each tale as well as its international classification number. This third volume contains 305 tales, those numbered 319–579, as well as forty-five additional tales from among those denied publication by the Russian censors. The folktales of A. N. Afanas’ev represent the largest single collection of folktales in any European language and perhaps in the world. Widely regarded as the Russian Grimm, Afanas’ev collected folktales from throughout the Russian Empire in what are now regarded as the three East Slavic languages, Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian. In his lifetime, Afanas’ev published more than 575 tales in his most popular and best-known work, Narodnye russkie skazki. In addition to this basic collection, he prepared a volume of Russian legends, many on religious themes; a collection of mildly obscene tales, Russkie zavetnye skazki; and voluminous writings on Slavic folklife and mythology. His works were subject to the strict censorship of ecclesiastical and state authorities that lasted until the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Overwhelmingly, his particular emendations were stylistic, while those of the censors mostly concerned content.