Three novels, Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and Ironweed, mostly about depression-era Albany.

A fictionalized account of Grace Marks, a maid who murdered her employer and his mistress in Canada in 1843.

Biddy becomes embroiled in a murderous conspiracy, knowing the secrets she holds could be a key to a better life, or her downfall. Inspired by eighteenth-century household books of recipes and set at the time of the invention of the first restaurants, An Appetite for Violets opens a window into the lives of servants, while also delivering a suspenseful tale of obsession and betrayal

Greenville County, South Carolina, is a wild, lush place that is home to the Boatwright family—a clan of hard-drinking men who shoot up each other’s trucks, and indomitable women who get married young. Ruth Anne Boatwright, a bastard child who suffers sexual abuse at the hands of her step-father, observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective.

In the fall of 2007, Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant, lands a job as a chauffeur for a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Their situation only improves when Jende's wife Neni is hired as household help. But in the course of their work, Jende and Neni begin to witness family secrets. Then, with the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, a tragedy changes all four lives forever.

Stories about Filipino migrant families struggling against hostile forces in Seattle and Alaska.

Explores the seedy world of the "working stiff" and the socialist movement of the 1930s.

Stories set in the Dominican Republic and in New Jersey. In Ysrael, a boy is disfigured by a pig, No Face is on his trip to America to undergo plastic surgery, and How to Date is on the art of dating interracially.

Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices, with results that captured both middle-class and worker-farmer readers.

When conditions in a mining community deteriorate, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all.

The story of migrant agricultural workers in California during the Depression.

In May of 1934, Oklahoma, a homeless man and his thirteen-year-old daughter are befriended by a charismatic drifter. The drifter lures father and daughter to Texas, where the father mysteriously disappears, and where his daughter begins a one-year ordeal as Palmer's captive on a crime spree-culminating in the notorious Greenville, Texas "skeleton murder" trial of 1935.

Tike and Ella May Hamlin are struggling to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas panhandle. Thanks to a five-cent government pamphlet, Tike has the know-how to build a simple adobe dwelling, a structure made from the land itself—fireproof, windproof, Dust Bowl-proof.

Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous – it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become.

A fearless young woman from a small African village starts a revolution against an American oil company in this sweeping, inspiring novel.

Beginning in 1968, a motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs from San Francisco's Chinatown make their way through the history of the day, becoming caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil that culminate in their effort to save the International Hotel--epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement.

A young Swedish boy finds himself in penniless and alone in California. He travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the West. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend.

The horrifying conditions of the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the century are revealed through this narrative of a young immigrant's struggles in America.

By the early 1930s, as America's economy collapses, Dorothea must find ways to support her two young sons single-handedly. Determined to expose the horrific conditions of the nation's poor, she takes to the road with her camera, creating images that inspire, reform, and define the era. And when the United States enters World War II, Dorothea chooses to confront the incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans.

The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators.

An Arab world never colonized, where magic-powered trams glide through a cosmopolitan Cairo and where djinns make mischief among humans.

Nebula Award Winner. Al-Jahiz transformed the world forty years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. A murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions. His dangerous magical abilities instigate unrest in the streets of Cairo that threaten to spill over onto the global stage.

Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is lost in the underworld of 1830s New Orleans. Desperate to escape the city’s bill collectors and the pawing hands of a schoolteacher hellbent on marrying him, he jumps aboard the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri.

Set in Chicago in the 1930s, the story of a young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a moment of panic.

Based on an actual, bloody dispute between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880.

Follows one Korean family, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a saga of a family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history.

When a Native American soldier returns home from Vietnam, he finds his remote seaside tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival.

Tells the story of the 1912 West Virginia coal miners' strike.

Set in England during Luddite revolts of 1811-12.

Centered on a community of immigrants who have traded their endangered lives as artists in China and Taiwan for the constant struggle of life at the poverty line in 1990s New York City.

Five characters, in very different circumstances--from a domestic cook in Mumbai, to a vagrant and his dancing bear, to a girl who escapes terror in her home village for a new life in the city--find out the meanings of dislocation and the desire for more.

Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. He follows his father's trade on the streets of Istanbul, and hopes to become rich like other villagers who have settled the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut's side.

Montgomery, Alabama, 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend intends to make a difference at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. But when her first week on the job takes her along a dusty country road to a worn-down one-room cabin, Civil is shocked to learn that her new patients, Erica and India, are children--just eleven and thirteen years old. "Highlights the horrific discrepancies in our healthcare system and illustrates their heartbreaking consequences."--Essence

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd, swept up by the tides of the Great Migration, flees Georgia and heads north to raise eleven children with grit and courage.

No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder.

When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression.