Ralph Bowden: 8 books

These stories explore the relationship between physical places and the lives of people in them or affected by them. The different places – an abandoned factory, a lonely beach in winter, a beer joint, an old water tank, a cemetery and others – elicit all kinds of responses from all kinds of people:...

The act of opening a vehicle to another who needs a ride opens both driver and rider to completely unpredictable and possibly dangerous interaction. Who knows who you're picking up? Who knows who's stopping for you? The eight short stories in this collection provide examples of the possibilities....

Col. Tyler French, recently retired from the army and divorced from his wife in California, comes east and buys a concrete house on a Carolina barrier island in the early 1990s. He hires a summer girl to help him make it livable, and negotiates with the local backhoe operator to build a seawall to...

After 11 years in an institution for the criminally insane, Colin, formerly a celebrated concert pianist, escapes with the help of a kitchen worker who recognizes that Colin’s gifts are being wasted. But he must find a way to avoid recapture in the world outside, first in the rough Tennessee mountain...

Jane, a 56 year old high school biology teacher, retires, divorces her lump of a husband, picks Lizette, a frisky hound mutt, out of the pound, and buys a 250 acre tract of remote mountain property in middle-east Tennessee. She moves into the primitive cabin and sets out to explore her new property...

A slightly spoofy omniscient narrator introduces us to Jenner, Inc., a stove manufacturing plant in a fictional middle Tennessee town, some of its personnel, and the sociology of the roughly 100 employees. The factory is owned by a large Chicago holding company, which has recently installed an aloof...

Fiona is the good buddy and scientific confrere of the young William Thomson, newly appointed to the chair of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University in 1849. Unconventional, uninhibited, and brilliant, she provides the keys to his scientific discoveries. She also takes it upon herself to tutor him...

Shadow Mountain defines the tiny remnant community of Shadow Valley in East Tennessee where the local pit mine closed in 1981. For many years since, Elsie, who has always lived in Shadow Valley, has been the sole caregiver of her father, a former miner with black lung disease. Now middle-aged and...