One sunny summer day in 1987, Carrie Brown and John Werner happened on Jimtown, an abandoned country store in northern California. Founded more than 100 years earlier, the Jimtown Store had held fast to its original building and its old-fashioned charm. Enchanted by its possibilities, Carrie and John decided to turn Jimtown into a new kind of country store: a gathering place for people to share down-to-earth, honest food in a beautiful setting.
The new Jimtown quickly became a favorite, offering exceptional main courses, soups, salads, sandwiches, sweets, and breakfast goods, all made from fresh local produce. Now everyone can enjoy the dishes that have made Jimtown so popular, faithfully recorded by Michael McLaughlin, who collaborated on the legendary Silver Palate cookbooks. Each of the more than 135 recipes blends time-honored simplicity with updated flavors and a modern-day appreciation of quality ingredients. From sophisticated starters such as Crisp Grilled Dates with Manchego and Bacon to their famous Pan-Fried Petaluma Duck Burgers to such homey desserts as the delicious Buttermilk Pie, the recipes are all accessible and imaginative. Unencumbered by national boundaries, The Jimtown Store Cookbook offers a tasty bazaar of international food. Also included are cooking tips, menus for entertaining, and as a welcome bonus, colorful profiles of local vendors. So invite the Jimtown spirit into your home and enjoy the bounties of a very special country store.

The Jimtown Store Cookbook: Recipes from Sonoma County's Favorite Country Market

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Brown, Carrie

McLaughlin, Michael

Werner, John

Regional & International

William Morrow Cookbooks

In The Rope Walk,Carrie Brown crafts a luminous story of a young girl's coming of age during a crucial summer in New England. On her tenth birthday Alice meets two visitors to her quiet town: Theo, the African American grandson of her father's best friend, and Kenneth, an artist who has come home to convalesce. Theo forms an instant bond with Alice that will indelibly change them both. The pair in turn befriend Kenneth, and decide to build a “rope walk” through the woods for him, allowing to make his way through the outdoor world he has always loved. But their good intentions lead to surprising consequences, and Alice soon learns how different the world of children and adults really are.

The Rope Walk: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

Anchor

From the author of The Rope Walk, here is the story of a woman’s life in its twilight, as she looks back on a harrowing childhood and on the unaccountable love and happiness that emerged from it. Ruth has always stood firmly beside her upstanding, brilliant husband, Peter, the legendary chief of New England’s Derry School for boys. The childless couple has a unique, passionate bond that grew out of Ruth’s arrival on Peter’s family’s doorstep as a young girl orphaned by tragedy. And though sometimes frustrated by her role as lifelong helpmate, Ruth is awed by her good fortune in her life with Peter. As the novel opens, we see the Derry School in all its glorious fall colors and witness the loosening of the aging Peter’s grasp: he will soon have to retire, and Ruth is wondering what they will do in their old age, separated from the school into which they have poured everything, including their savings. The narrative takes us back through the years, revealing the explosive spark and joy between Ruth and Peter—undiminished now that they are in their seventies—and giving us a deeply felt portrait of a woman from a generation that quietly put individual dreams aside for the good of a partnership, and of the ongoing gift of the right man’s love.

The Last First Day: A Novel

Pantheon

Ruth and Peter have been married more than fifty years. He is the headmaster of the Derry School, a boys’ boarding school in Maine; she has spent the four decades of her husband's tenure helping out wherever she is needed. But Peter’s retirement is approaching, and Ruth wonders what will become of them when it finally arrives. How will they survive separated from the school into which they have poured everything, including their savings? As the story takes us back through the years, revealing the explosive spark and joy that brought Ruth and Peter together in their youth, The Last First Day becomes a deeply felt portrait of a woman from a generation that quietly put individual dreams aside for the good of the partnership, and of the ongoing gift of loving and being loved in return.

The Rope Walk brings us the dazzling story of a pivotal summer in the life of Alice, a redheaded tomboy and motherless girl who is beloved and protected by her five older brothers and her widower father, a professor of Shakespeare. On Memorial Day, at her tenth birthday party in the garden of her Vermont village home, Alice meets two people unlike any she’s known before. Theo is a mixed-race New York City kid visiting his white grandparents for the summer. Kenneth is a cosmopolitan artist with AIDS who has come home to convalesce with his middle-aged sister. Alice and Theo form an instant bond and, almost as quickly, find themselves drawn into the orbit of the magisterial Kenneth. When the children begin a daily routine of reading aloud to the artist, who is losing his eyesight, they discover the journals of Lewis and Clark and decide to embark on their own wilderness adventure: they plan and secretly build a “rope walk” through the woods for Kenneth and in the process learn the first of many hard truths about the way adults see the world, no matter that they are often wrong. The great gift of The Rope Walk is its exquisitely poised writing. Alice’s narrative is a profound experience of innocence, of perception balanced between childhood and adulthood. The flying spark of new friendship, the first intimation of adult love, the consolation of devotion, which allow Alice and Theo to shed light in the midst of darkness and to find joy in mutual understanding: these glistening threads are drawn together in a timeless story–profound, seductive, wise, and moving, from first to last.

The Hatbox Baby

A baby born three months early is brought to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933 by his father, who hopes the fair's famous baby doctor will save the infant's life.

Literary

Berkley Trade

Collects short tales of people attempting to discover their place in the world, with settings including a widow's empty kitchen and neglected backyard, a house on the Rhode Island seaside, and a museum in a small Spanish village. Reprint.

The House on Belle Isle and other Stories

A refugee from Vienna and the war in Europe, Arthur Henning is comfortable in his new life as a chauffeur for a New York banker and his family, but his complacency is thrown into turmoil when he is ordered to drive Aggie, the daughter of the family, to a home for unwed mothers, where her family plans to have her give up her baby for adoption. Reprint.

Confinement

Mythology & Folk Tales

In the four months since Conrad Morrisey's beloved wife, Rose, died, he has let her cherished garden slide into neglect, just as he has stopped caring what he eats or wears. But there, in Rose's overgrown and unkempt garden, Conrad receives an unearthly visitor, familiar yet perplexing. What does this mean? What should he do? What would vivacious Rose have done? She would not have kept it a secret, Conrad decides, so he begins to share his story. And suddenly he finds himself at the center of Rose's life in a way he'd never experienced, learning how she touched the lives of people he barely knew. These people, from a silent, damaged young woman to the twittering ladies of Rose's drama group, shape his own days as they make unlikely pilgrimages to the garden. Conrad had thought his life was over, but something vital has yet to happen, on the wings of Rose's last message of love. Incandescent, quirky, and poignant, Rose's Garden is an unforgettable story of undying love.

Rose's Garden

Contemporary

Bantam]

Lamb in Love

In the tiny English village of Hursley, two lifelong acquaintances have never given each other a second glance. Until, on the very night of man's first moon landing, a precipitous passion alights on their middle-aged existence. Out for a stroll, Norris Lamb--postmaster, stamp collector, and church organist--spies spinster Vida Stephen dancing with glorious, uncharacteristic abandon by the moonlit fountain of the mansion where she tends the mute, retarded son of an absent employer. Norris senses a buried bravado and romance, a fragility and loneliness, that match his own. And he sets out, covertly, to woo her. But both Norris and Vida are innocents in this endeavor. His courtship blunders down many wrong turns before it finds its unlooked-for catalyst in Manford, the gentle young man who is Vida's charge...and blossoms as a force to change three lives. In luminous prose laced with quiet humor, Lamb in Love shows how love transforms the most ordinary and imperfect mortals. Vida, unaware that Norris is in the throes of a wild--but unvoiced--passion, must herself decide whether to remain in the small English village where she has lived her entire life, or strike out on her own in search of a grand adventure. Watching these two people surprised by love is Manford, the young disabled man who has been in Vida's charge for the last twenty years. Possessed of a strange and gentle intelligence, it is through Manford that Norris and Vida finally come to recognize each other and themselves. Heartwarm- ing, madcap, utterly beautiful, LAMB IN LOVE celebrates the strange and mysterious brilliance that is love. And it confirms Carrie Brown's status as an important and luminous talent. --&gt;

Romance

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brown, Carrie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Brown, Carrie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Brown, Carrie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Jimtown Store Cookbook: Recipes from Sonoma County's Favorite Country Market

The Rope Walk: A Novel

The Last First Day: A Novel

The Last First Day: A Novel

The Rope Walk: A Novel

The Hatbox Baby

The House on Belle Isle and other Stories

Confinement

Rose's Garden

Lamb in Love