Lee Martin

In Quakertown, Lee Martin travels back in time to 1920s Texas to tell the story of a flourishing black community that was segregated from its white brethren--and of the remarkable gardener who was asked to do the unimaginable.Based on the true story of a shameful episode in north Texas history, Quakertown draws on the rich texture of the South--the Pecan Creek running along the edges of Quakertown, the remarkable and rare white lilac, and the rising tensions marking each nod and greeting. With strength and a deep wisdom of heart, Martin carves out the delicate story of two families--one white and one black--and the child whose birth brought a gift of forgiveness.Suffused with Martin's deep compassion and profound humanity, Quakertown is an unforgettable novel from a master of American prose.

On a night no one will ever forget, Della Black and three of her seven children are killed in a horrific fire in their trailer. As the surviving children are caught in the middle of a custody battle between their well-intentioned neighbor and their father and his pregnant mistress, new truths about what really happened the night of the fire come to light. When the fire marshal determines the cause - arson - rumors quickly circulate as the townspeople search for answers. Ronnie Black is the kind of man who can leave his wife and children for a younger woman, but is he capable of something more sinister? Ronnie and his girlfriend, Brandi Tate, maintain his innocence - he's a loving, caring father who wants to do everything he can to protect his family. But as the gossip continues, Ronnie feels his children (and, eventually, Brandi) pulling away from him. Soon enough, he finds himself at a crossroads - should he allow gossipmongers to seal his fate, or should he fight to prove that he's not the monster people paint him to be? In Late One Night, Lee Martin examines the devastating effect of rumors and the resilience of one family in the face of the ultimate tragedy.

Sam Jeffries' wife left him and then promptly up and died. Everyone believes he was to blame. Now, despite Ike Ramsey, who rules this part of western Colorado, Sam must save Ike's daughter-in-law from a hanging. Sam, a grumpy ex-lawman, finds the fugitive Lorena and her mute son, Asa, in desperate need of help.Lorena had married Ike's son, Hoag. As soon as he showed his true, brutal nature, she shot Hoag, took Asa, and ran. Sam knows that Ike and his harpy of a wife, Emma, won't stop until they've caught and punished Lorena. Sam is the only one who can protect them as they travel south to meet Lorena's family in Texas.The three put in their lots with two old army scouts and a roguish gambler. As the group travels through the badlands, Sam will find out that he may have put his trust in the wrong people. As Ike, his vicious wife, sons, and hired guns dog them at every turn, Sam, Lorena, and Asa will all have to outwit and outrun their pursuers.

Fans today may be surprised to learn Scott Russell Sanders was previously one of the brightest science-fiction newcomers of the 1980s. In Dancing in Dreamtime, he returns to his roots, exploring both inner and outer space in a speculative collection of short stories. At a time when humankind faces unprecedented, global-scale challenges from climate change, loss of biodiversity, dwindling vital resources, and widespread wars, this collection of planetary tales will strike a poignant chord with the reader. Sanders has created worlds where death tolls rise due to dream deprivation, where animals only exist in mechanical form, and where poisoned air forces people to live in biodomes. Never before has Sanders's writing been so relevant and never before have the lessons in these stories been so important.

On a night no one will ever forget, Della Black and three of her seven children are killed in a horrific fire in their trailer. As the surviving children are caught in the middle of a custody battle between their well-intentioned neighbor and their father and his pregnant mistress, new truths about what really happened the night of the fire come to light. When the fire marshal determines the cause – arson – rumors quickly circulate as the townspeople search for answers. Ronnie Black is the kind of man who can leave his wife and children for a younger woman, but is he capable of something more sinister?Ronnie and his girlfriend, Brandi Tate, maintain his innocence – he’s a loving, caring father who wants to do everything he can to protect his family. But as the gossip continues, Ronnie feels his children (and, eventually, Brandi) pulling away from him. Soon enough, he finds himself at a crossroads – should he allow gossipmongers to seal his fate, or should he fight to prove that he’s not the monster people paint him to be?In Late One Night, Lee Martin examines the devastating effect of rumors and the resilience of one family in the face of the ultimate tragedy.

"CLOAK & DAGGER IN THE OLD WEST"" Set among the splendor of the Rocky Mountains in 1880, The Grant Conspiracy takes you to a Colorado mining town being torn apart by an evil law firm out for revenge, not for the War Between the States, but for Black Friday.Frost and Hancock are ex-Confederates who, with the help of their henchmen, are plotting the assassination of former president Ulysses S. Grant. But their hatred comes from pure greed. They lost their fortunes when trying to corner the gold market in 1869, thanks to then President Grant, who dumped government gold on the market.Now, with Grant planning a tour of the Rockies by wagon, they're scheming to lure him to Mountain Springs by inviting Matt Tyler, the man who saved the general's life during the war, to come work for their law firm.However, President Hayes is on to them and he's sending the young lawyer to Colorado on a dangerous mission to scuttle their plan.Greeted by the brutal murder of a law clerk, Matt can immediately smell trouble in the air.With allies such as the beautiful Jennifer White, who has incurred the constant ire of the firm with her blazing newspaper editorials, and a black veteran, Matt sets out to save Grant's life a second time-and bring peace to the fractured town.

Laney--a skinny, awkward teenager alone in the world--thinks she's found a kindred spirit in thirty-five-year-old Delilah. Then the police come to ask Laney questions and she finds herself reconstructing a story of suspense, deceit, and revenge; a story that will haunt her forever. Seven hundred miles away, in Texas, Miss Baby has the hardened heart of a woman who has been used by men in every possible way, yet she is desperate for true love. When she meets a stranger, a man who claims he can't remember his real name or his past but who seems gentle and trusting, Miss Baby thinks she may have finally found someone to love, someone who will protect her from the abusive men who fill her past. But Miss Baby and Laney are connected by a terrible crime, and, bit by bit, the complex web of deceptions and seemingly small misjudgments they've each helped to create starts to unravel--all the way to the shocking, tragic climax.

Lee Martin tells us in his memoir, "I was never meant to come along. My parents married late. My father was thirty-eight, my mother forty-one. When he found out she was pregnant, he asked the doctor, 'Can you get rid of it?'" From such an inauspicious beginning, Martin began collecting impressions that, through the tincture of time and the magic of his narrative gift, have become the finely wrought pieces of Such a Life. Whether recounting the observations of a solemn child, understood only much later, or exploring the intricacies of neighborhood politics at middle age, Martin offers us a richly detailed, highly personal view that effortlessly expands to illuminate our world. At a tender age Martin moved to a new level of complexity, of negotiating silences and sadness, when his father lost both of his hands in a farming accident. His stories of youth (from a first kiss to a first hangover) and his reflections on age (as a vegan recalling the farm food of his childhood or as a writer contemplating the manual labor of his father and grandfather) bear witness to the observant child he was and the insightful and irresistible storyteller he's become. His meditations on family form a highly evocative portrait of the relationships at the heart of our lives.

Queenie Doyle ruled over south London gangland and her four daughters - Frankie, Mags, Sharon and Roxie - with an iron fist. When Queenie´s death brings the Doyle empire crashing down, the sisters grow apart, - each taking a different path in life. Eldest sister Frankie has a lot of love to give but her dreams have been stifled by being forced into becoming mother to the girls at just 18. Crazy Mags committed the ultimate rebellion against her upbringing - by joining the police force. Baby Roxie is living it up on the Costa Del Sol, but she leaves a string of dead men behind her. Sharon marries Monty, an accountant and settles down to raise a family and to live a perfect life in suburbia - but her world is shattered when Monty dies in mysterious circumstances. But is it an accident or murder? As the Doyle sisters pull together to find out what really happened to Monty they enter a world of drugs, dirty money and clean guns, risking their own safety to deal out their own brand of justice. Because, when someone harms the Doyles, they soon realise that these sisters fight as one. After all, blood is thicker than water...

From Our House is the luminous and uniquely American memoir of Lee Martin, born into a farming family the same year his father unexpectedly lost both hands. Lee's father, once known for "doing a good turn for his neighbors," changed that afternoon in the cornfields, becoming an embittered, hardened man. "All our lives have private truths," Martin writes, "and the truth about my father was that after his accident he brought a deep and abiding rage into our home. I knew his hooks as intimately as I ever knew anything about my father." "How easily our bodies become us, our souls bound to the material, to the joy or grief or pain we feel through our skin," Martin muses. Ultimately it is his mother's quiet compassion that accounts for the grace that Lee and his father finally discover both within themselves and within their small family. Learning to live by the seasons and to fall asleep to the rumble of his father's tractor, braving snowstorms to sell hogs or to visit an ailing grandmother, playing basketball, listening to baseball games, and stealing records, Lee endures the anger and shame that haunt his family—yet grows up to tell his tale with rare beauty and remarkable forbearance.

A dark, harrowing novel about a nine-year-old girl's disappearance and the lasting impact it has on her close-knit community On an evening like any other, nine-year-old Katie Mackey, daughter of the most affluent family in a small town on the plains of Indiana, sets out on her bicycle to return some library books. This simple act is at the heart of The Bright Forever, a deeply affecting novel about the choices people make that change their lives forever. Fact, speculation, and contradiction play off one another as the details about Katie's disappearance--and about the townspeople--unfold, creating a fast-paced story that is as gripping as it is richly human. A nuanced portrayal of the complicated give and take among people struggling to maintain their humanity in the shadow of a loss, The Bright Forever is a compelling and emotional tale about the human need to know even the hardest truth.

The Third Moon is Blue is a marvelous mix of psychodrama and terror, romance and loss, self-absorption and contrition, culminating in one man's ultimate understanding that after his passionate journey through life, what mattered most were the things from which he had walked away...love, family and home.

Using scant historical and personal records as a starting place, the author recreates the lives of his great-grandparents-farmers who traveled West to settle in Illinois-reconstructing six generations of family history in the process. (Biography)