In this evocative first novel, a young woman returns to her rural Vermont hometown in the wake of a devastating storm to search for her missing mother and unravel a powerful family secret It’s August 2011, and Tropical Storm Irene has just wreaked havoc on Vermont, flooding rivers and destroying homes. One thousand miles away—while tending bar in New Orleans—Vale receives a call and is told that her mother, Bonnie, has disappeared. Despite a years-long estrangement from Bonnie, Vale drops everything and returns home to look for her. Though the hometown Vale comes back to is not the one she left eight years earlier, she finds herself falling back into the lives of the family she thought she’d long since left behind. As Vale begins her search, the narrative opens up and pitches back and forth in time to follow three generations of women—a farming widow, a back-to-the-land dreamer, and an owl-loving hermit—as they seek love, bear children, and absorb losses. All the while, Vale’s search has her unwittingly careening toward a family origin secret more stunning than she ever imagined. Written with a striking sense of place, Heart Spring Mountain is an arresting novel about returning home, finding hope in the dark, and of the power of the land—and the stories it harbors—to connect and to heal. It’s also an absorbing exploration of the small fractures that can make families break-and the lasting ties that bind them together.

As the struggle to protect Northwest salmon runs and the urgency of the fight against environmental deterioration escalates, Mountain in the Clouds remains an important and illuminating story, as timely now as when it was first written. The 1995 edition includes a selection of historical photographs.

The author offers first hand accounts of profound experiences and mountain living from cherished memories of a passing era..

Peter, Michael and Emma are strangers, each despatched by their parents for a week's holiday with the Myers in their cottage at the foot of a Welsh mountain. Coincidence? Or has the strange neighbour, Mrs White, somehow lured them to enact an awesome quest? They are an uneasy trio, uncomfortable in their forced alliance, and they face their circumstances in very different ways - Mrs Myers anxious 'mothering', the enigmatic Mrs White, and the swirling sense of fear that seems trapped in the lane running past her house, her stories of Arthur's Way, the old straight track shrouded in legend that leads straight to the peak of the mountain, and her obsession with diverting the spring at the top. There are peculiar visitors and strange warnings, yet the children feel compelled to set off up Arthur's Way at the most dangerous time of year. What they discover, about unseen forces on earth, about the price of disturbing nature, about themselves, leads to a gripping climax in a spell-binding tale. First published in 1973 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.

"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."—The New York Times Book Review Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods—all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever. “An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year after year.” —The Horn Book

Untrue things are rumored of May Rose, but it's true she's too pretty for her own good. Her husband has disappeared, and now she's on her own in a rough town ruled by one of the lumber companies logging the last of West Virginia's virgin forest. The year is 1899, and a woman alone has few options. With no resources but a litter of pigs and the attachment of an untamed girl, May Rose must find a way to survive with respect. She must also save the girl who sleeps with a doll clutched tight and a knife under her pillow.

Grace McNicol’s lifelong delight in walking and hiking helped her achieve feats considered impossible by many. At the age of 62, she moved to Tennessee and began climbing Mount Le Conte, a 6,593-foot mountain in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She overcame a broken back, two strokes, and other personal hardships to climb the mountain a record 244 times. This revised and expanded volume includes photos, diary entries, andGracie’s Wildflower Notebook, which contains entries compiled during the year she made her 200th climb. This inspirational biography chronicles the uplifting life and achievements of a remarkable woman.

'Days On The Mountain' features photographs made in and near Rosenthal's cabin in Washington state over a fifteen year period. The meditative, poetic narrative serves as an introduction to his acclaimed series 'The Forest'. With essays by photographic historian/writer George Slade and Ken Rosenthal.

Elena Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs is the moving story of a Soviet girl who discovers the truths adults are hiding from her and the lies her homeland lives by. Elena’s country is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars, but a nation struggling to retain its power and its pride. Born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, Elena finds her passion in the complexity of the English language—but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s such a passion verges on the subversive. Elena is controlled by the state the same way she is controlled by her mother, a mirror image of her motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. In the battle between a strong-willed daughter and her authoritarian mother, the daughter, in the end, must break free and leave in order to survive. Through Elena’s captivating voice, we learn not only the stories of Russian family life in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose curiosity and determination finally transport her to a new world. It is an elegy to the lost country of childhood, where those who leave can never return.

The Southern Appalachians are home to a breathtakingly diverse array of living things--from delicate orchids to carnivorous pitcher plants, from migrating butterflies to flying squirrels, and from brawny black bears to more species of salamander than anywhere else in the world. Mountain Nature is a lively and engaging account of the ecology of this remarkable region. It explores the animals and plants of the Southern Appalachians and the webs of interdependence that connect them. Within the region's roughly 35 million acres, extending from north Georgia through the Carolinas to northern Virginia, exists a mosaic of habitats, each fostering its own unique natural community. Stories of the animals and plants of the Southern Appalachians are intertwined with descriptions of the seasons, giving readers a glimpse into the interlinked rhythms of nature, from daily and yearly cycles to long-term geological changes. Residents and visitors to Great Smoky Mountains or Shenandoah National Parks, the Blue Ridge Parkway, or any of the national forests or other natural attractions within the region will welcome this appealing introduction to its ecological wonders.