"After teaching in a 1920s mining town in western Canada, Beth Thatcher no longer feels at home among her wealthy family in the East, and her heart is torn between two very different worlds"--

When Beth Thatcher returns to Coal Valley, she has much to be excited about. She anticipates Jarrick's proposal of marriage and perhaps a spring wedding. The mine is expanding, and there are more schoolchildren than ever. But the town's rapid growth brings many challenges. A second teacher is assigned, and Beth finds herself going head-to-head with a very different philosophy of education--one that dismisses religion and rejects God. Fearful for the...

George Bowering was born in Penticton, where his great-grandfather Willis Brinson lived, and Bowering has never been all that far from the Okanagan Valley in his heart and imagination. Early in the twenty-first century, he was made a permanent citizen of Oliver. Bowering has family up and down the Valley, and he goes there as often as he can. He has been asked during his many visits to Okanagan bookstores over the years to publish a collection of...

A Confederate soldier, out to exact revenge on the Union soldiers who murdered his wife, follows their trail to the raucous, traveling town alongside the construction of the transcontinental railroad.