Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Wildlife biologist Deanna is caught off guard by an intrusive young hunter, while bookish city wife Lusa finds herself facing a difficult identity choice, and elderly neighbors find attraction at the height of a long-standing feud.

The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer's career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track -- until the recession hits and she gets downsized, furloughed, escorted out of the building. Samantha, though, is one of the "lucky" associates. She's offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she'd get her old job back. In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan...

Randall Stargill's imminent death stirs up the living and the dead, with a real estate developer poised to snap up the Stargill's Appalachian farm, Randall's four sons trying to deal with each other and the demands left by their dying father, and an old sweetheart hoping to lay a long-held secret to rest.

The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival....

A little girl, lost in a forest along the Appalachian Trail, draws comfort from tuning her radio to Boston Red Sox broadcasts and following her hero, relief pitcher Tom Gordon. He becomes her key to surviving an unseen enemy leaving slaughtered animals and mangled trees in its wake.

"Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

Set in the present day in the rural community of Feathertown, Tennessee, this novel tells the story of Dellarobia Turnbow, a petite, razor-sharp 29-year-old who nurtured worldly ambitions before becoming pregnant and marrying at seventeen. Now, after more than a decade of tending to small children on a failing farm, oppressed by poverty, isolation and her husband's antagonistic family, she has mitigated her boredom by surrendering to an obsessive...

Rural Kentucky in the 1950's is not an easy place to grow up, and it's especially hard for ten-year-old Icy Sparks, an orphan who lives with her grandparents. Life becomes even more difficult when she develops Tourette's syndrome. Narrated by a now-grown Icy, this novel offers warmth and humor as it recounts a young girl's painful and poignant journey to womanhood.

"Avery Robinson decided to be a physician after helplessly watching her mother lose a battle with a terrible disease. Now at risk of developing the same illness, Avery guards her heart from love. She's driven to protect her loved ones as a workaholic doctor in the tiny mountain town of Riverbend Gap, North Carolina. Contractor Wes Garrett is hiking the Appalachian trail, in memory of the man who died saving his life, when an illness racks his body....

"When her mother's death leaves Charlotte Simpson bereft, she hopes the Robinson clan will accept her as one of their own and help fill the void. But a startling discovery dashes her hopes and leaves her wondering if she will ever know the father she's always longed for. Horse trainer Gunner Dawson has experienced profound loss and intends to avoid it. So he lives on the move without forming close bonds or putting down roots. When Charlotte hires...