Charles Gilman Norris

Rough Around The Edges A hard eyed man, Flint Mahone came back from the War Between the States with only one tender feeling left - for the missing children of his dead brother. So when the three little ones showed up on his doorstep with a fierce Wyoming winter in the offing, he knew he would do whatever it took to make them a home. Soft At Heart Lauren Hart had been raised among outlaws, taught to gamble to make her way in the world, but she wanted nothing more than to lead a decent life, to meet other girls her age, to own a pretty dress. One glance told her Flint Mahone was trouble, a ladies' man who knew all the right moves and none of the right emotions. Love was as foreign to him as marriage, but Lauren couldn't resist his plea for help. And when she saw the gentle way he held his little niece, she knew there was hope yet of reaching the warm, caring man beneath the wild, carousing cowboy.

A guileless group of misfits share an extraordinary undertaking in this novel set in 1968. Recently bereaved, a Montana guitar-maker pursues a dream he has contemplated for many years -- to break the wheel-driven world land-speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Four unlikely team-mates volunteer their energies to build a four-engined streamlined racing car: Jill, an aspiring tap dancer; Beth, a failed fashion model; Ephram, a curmudgeonly engine-builder and Holocaust survivor; and Stan, an orphan, metalworker, and Vietnam draftee-apparent. The thoughts and anxieties of each character are revealed and the meaning they have discovered in their hopes and dreams in life is discovered.

A novel of Trinidad featuring Alford George, the son of a poor farm worker who rises above his class through sheer perseverance. He learns to speak properly by listening to broadcasts from England, studies hard to become a teacher, then turns activist to improve the educational system. That sends him into politics. By the author of The Wine of Astonishment.