The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

President Jimmy Carter has become an acclaimed, best-selling author since his days in the White House. In An Hour Before Daylight, he offers poignant remembrances of his childhood days in Depression-era rural Georgia. With eloquent yet conversational prose, Carter recalls the events and people who shaped his life from his earliest days. He describes the sharecropping economy of the 1930s, where hard farm labor was done by hand and those who worked...

"A stunning, lyrical coming-of-age novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl, with only the compass of her father's imagination, must navigate racism, sexism, and the dark secrets that will haunt her for the rest of her life. "A girl comes of age against the knife." So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in Arkansas in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings....