The Hills At Home

A land rich with oil, alive with passion, stained with tears—and the family who embraced it all. Duty and desire warred in May Rose Fallen Hawk when she made the fateful decision to marry Claude Rainwater. No decent woman had ever married a Rainwater—a brawling, hell-raising clan of dirt-poor Osage—but May Rose had adored Claude ever since she was a child. Now she would defy her family to belong to him, risking her future on a wild, unpredictable man whose spirit could never be tamed. Across three decades—and an Oklahoma seared by dust and scarred by oil rigs—May Rose and Claude fought to make a place of their own. Through boom times, depression, and war . . . through years of sacrifice, triumph, and joy, May Rose found strength and sorrow in her five sons. Together and apart, this remarkable family gathered courage from the age-old traditions of the Osage—and embraced all the passions of the rugged, enduring land they called home. The spellbinding saga of a Native American family through three generations of triumph, tragedy, and love.

While always well-stocked with clean sheets, Lily Hill is not expecting visitors. At least not in the numbers that descend upon her genteely dilapidated New England ancestral home in the summer of 1989. Brother Harvey arrives first, thrice-widowed and eager for company; then perennially self-dramatizing niece Ginger and her teenaged daughter Betsy; then Alden, just laid-off from Wall Street, with his wife Becky, and their rowdy brood of four. As summer fades into fall, it becomes clear that no one intends to leave. But just as Lily's industrious hospitality gives way to a somewhat strained domestic routine, the Hill clan must face new challenges together.

To most outsiders, the hills of the Scottish Borders are a bleak and foreboding space - usually made to represent the stigmatized Other, Ad Finis, by the centers of power in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. At a time when globalization seems to threaten our sense of place, people of the Scottish borderlands provide a vivid case study of how the being-in-place is central to the sense of self and identity. Since the end of the thirteenth century, people living in the Scottish Border hills have engaged in armed raiding on the frontier with England, developed capitalist sheep farming in the newly united kingdom of Great Britain, and are struggling to maintain their family farms in one of the marginal agricultural rural regions of the European Community. Throughout their history, sheep farmers living in these hills have established an abiding sense of place in which family and farm have become refractions of each other. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, this book concentrates on the contemporary farming practices - shepherding, selling lambs and rams at auctions - as well as family and class relations through which hill sheep fuse people, place, and way of life to create this sense of being-at-home in the hills.

1945. After the Second World War, Ellen and her daughter Netta make the journey from Germany back to Scotland. Nestled in the hills of the Southern Uplands is the farm where Ellen grew up – the home she left to be with the only man she's ever loved. She is still haunted by her memories... and the secrets she dare not share with anyone. Having grown up in Freiburg, farm life is new and exciting to Netta. Determined to be useful, she offers to help new shepherd, Andrew Cameron. But doing so might put her bruised heart at risk... The war took so much from Ellen and Netta. But maybe now the sanctuary of the hills can offer them the hope of a new beginning. A heartwrenching Scottish saga, perfect for fans of Sheila Jeffries and Katie Flynn.

"It is the summer of 1989, and three generations of the Hill family have descended upon the quiet old manse of their maiden Aunt Lily."--P. [4] of cover.