| Holly | Albert French | Set in a small North Carolina town during the final year of WWII, this novel tells the story of a young white girl from the wrong side of the tracks who falls in love with a handsome, educated black soldier just back from the war. |
| Homewood Books | John Edgar Wideman | These two novellas and collection of short stories--Hiding Place (1981), Sent for You Yesterday (1984), and Damballah (1981)--share characters, events, and locales, and are set in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, where Wideman was raised. |
| I Can’t Wait on God | Albert French | A couple seeks to escape the poverty and hardship of the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh by fleeing to New York after an impulsive murder. |
| Out of This Furnace | Thomas Bell | Our all-time bestselling title, this classic and powerful novel spanning three generations of a Slovak immigrant family. It has been adopted for course use in more than 300 colleges and universities nationwide. |
| Shadows on a Wall | Hilary Masters | As a novel deeply concerned with the relationship of politics and art, this work follows the story of department store founder E. J. Kaufmann and his interactions with Mexican painter Juan O’Gorman. The narrative describes the unexpected events that led Kaufmann to commission murals from this avid Marxist and, ultimately, his failure to use them. |
| Valley of Decision | Marcia Davenport | Pittsburgh author Marcia Davenport’s absorbing and complex chronicle of a family’s fortunes from the economic panic of 1873 through the dramatic rise of American industry and trade unionism, through waves of immigration, class conflict, natural disaster, World War I, to Pearl Harbor. |
