In fifteenth-century England, Richard Lanyon, who had sacrificed the happiness of his own family to become a landowner, finds he can no longer live with the guilt of his past, while his son, agreeing to an arranged marriage, harbors his own lost dreams.

When, during the Great Depression, tenant farmers and sharecroppers were pushed off the land they had worked but never owned, many sought power in numbers by organizing unions. In 1934, seven black men and eleven white men organized the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Socialist Harry Leland Mitchell was one of those men. Mean Things Happening in This Land is his autobiographical account of SFTU struggles -- against poverty, New Deal agencies, communists,...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers — and two very dangerous men — came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke’s world.

A brutal murder leaves the town seething in gossip...

The story follows the struggles of an idealistic farmer trying to raise a family and a crop of cotton in the face of extraordinary challenges, both natural and societal.