Set against the background of dust bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, this novel tells the story of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel West in search of the promised land.

Follows the interwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

Lee Chong, the astute owner of the well-stocked grocery store, is also the proprietor of the Palace Flophouse that Mack and his troupe of good-natured 'boys' call home. Dora runs the brothel with clockwork efficiency and a generous heart, and Doc is the fount of all wisdom.

A magnificent sweeping tale from the international bestselling author of 'The House of the Spirits'.

Streetwise George and his childlike friend Lennie are drifters, searching for work in the fields and valleys of California. They have nothing except the clothes on their back, and a hope that one day they'll find a place of their own and live the American dream. But do dreams come at a price!

A burgeoning city is built on the dreams of the American gold rush. In 1906 the dreams of this city, came crashing down beneath the rippling wave of a horrifying earthquake. This story delves beneath the surface of the earth, and explains why the world moves as it does. It portrays the lives of the people who suffered and survived the devastation.

When Kathy, a young recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, fails to open a series of tax letters that have been sent to her in error, the State of California seizes the house she and her brother have inherited from her father. The State sells the house at auction to Behrani, a former Iranian Air Force officer.

Bestselling author Isabel Allende's first adult novel since 'Portrait in Sepia' -- beautiful, disturbing and atmospheric.

Danny is a paisano, descended from the original Spanish settlers who arrived in Monterey, California, centuries before. He values friendship above money and possessions, so that when he suddenly inherits two houses, Danny is quick to offer shelter to his fellow gentlemen of the road.

Just after Independence Day in July 1953 Violet Sullivan, a local good time girl drives off in her brand new Chevy and is never seen again. Left behind is her young daughter, Daisy, and Violet's impetuous husband, Foley, who had been persuaded to buy his errant wife the car only days before ...Now, thirty-five years later, Daisy wants closure.

When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife. But these two men are fated against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants.

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc.

A novel that is as beautiful and as dangerous as the Oleander Chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her booclub Over a million copies in print

When Steve Sillett was 19 years old, he free-climbed - with no safety equipment and no training - one of the tallest trees on earth, in the redwood forests of Prairie Creek, California. 30 storeys above the ground he glimpsed an undiscovered ecosystem, and his passion for that world would transform the rest of his life.

Tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks on a search to rediscover his grandmother, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a 100 years earlier.

A memoir of land, family and perseverance from one of the most influential writers in America.

First there was a phone call from a stranger, then a letter showed up 14 years after it was sent. That's how I learned. I'd made an error in judgement and ended up risking my life. The call comes on a Monday morning from a guy who scavenges defaulted storage units at auction. Last weekend he bought a stack. They had stuff in them - Kinsey stuff.

Six people five women and a man meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable under the ...

Jody Tiflin is given a red pony, and later he is promised the colt of a bay mare. Yet both of these gifts bring him tragedy as well as joy, and Jody is taught not only the harsh lessons of life and death, but made painfully aware of the fallibilty of adults.

The discovery of gold by a team of Mormon mill workers in 1848 sparked a frenzy that shook the world. People swarmed to California from as far as China and Australia.