October brings happy changes: the leaves are turning luscious shades, and our monthly e-book promotion has a new name — Lucky Stars. Each month, you can enjoy some of our wonderful, classic e-books, centered on a theme and chock full of bonus materials — all for $3.99 a piece or less.

This month, we’re featuring the fiction of acclaimed and beloved author Robert Morgan. And each e-book includes a FREE preview of his brand new novel, The Road from Gap Greek.

This Rock by Robert Morgan: From the author of Gap Creek-an international best-seller and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award-comes the gripping story of two brothers struggling against each other and the confines of their mountain world in 1920s Appalachia.

The Powell brothers-Muir and Moody-are as different as Cain and Abel. Muir is an innocent, a shy young man with big dreams. Moody, the older and wilder brother-embittered by the death of his father, by years of fighting his mother, and by his jealousy of Muir’s place in the family-takes to moonshine and gambling and turns his anger on his brother. Muir escapes by wandering, making his way around the country in attempts to find something-an occupation, a calling-to match his ambition.

Through it all, their mother, Ginny, tries to steer her boys right, all the while remembering her own losses: her husband (whose touch still haunts her), her youth, and the fiery sense of God that once ordered her world.

When Muir, in a drunken vision, decides that his purpose in life is to clear a space on a hill and build a stone church with his own hands, the consequences of his plan are far-reaching and irrevocable: a community threatens to tear itself apart, men die, and his family is forever changed. All that’s left in the aftermath are the ghosts and the memories of a new man.

This e-book includes a FREE preview of The Road from Gap Creek.

You can buy the This Rock e-book for $1.99 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo. 

The Truest Pleasure by Robert Morgan: Ginny, who marries Tom at the turn of the century after her family has given up on her ever marrying, narrates The Truest Pleasure –the story of their life together on her father’s farm in the western North Carolina mountains. They have a lot in common–love of the land and fathers who fought in the Civil War. Tom’s father died in the war, but Ginny’s father came back to western North Carolina to hold on to the farm and turn a profit. Ginny’s was a childhood of relative security, Tom’s one of landlessness. Truth be known–and they both know it–their marriage is mutually beneficial in purely practical terms. Tom wants land to call his own. Ginny knows she can’t manage her aging father’s farm by herself. But there is also mutual attraction, and indeed their “loving” is deeply gratifying. What keeps getting in the way of it, though, are their obsessions. Tom Powell’s obsession is easy to understand. He’s a workaholic who hoards time and money. Ginny is obsessed by Pentecostal preaching. That she loses control of her dignity, that she speaks “in tongues,” that she is “saved,” seem to her a blessing and to Tom a disgrace. It’s not until Tom lies unconscious and at the mercy of a disease for which the mountain doctor has no cure that Ginny realizes her truest pleasure is her love for her husband. Like Cold Mountain, the time and place of The Truest Pleasure are remote from contemporary American life, but its rendering of the nature of marriage is timeless and universal.

This e-book includes a FREE preview of The Road from Gap Creek.

You can buy the The Truest Pleasure e-book for $2.99 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo.

Gap Creek by Robert Morgan: Young Julie Harmon works “hard as a man,” they say, so hard that at times she’s not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better.

But Julie and Hank’s new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what to fear most—the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap Creek a timeless story of a marriage.

This e-book includes a FREE preview of The Road from Gap Creek.

You can buy the Gap Creek e-book for $3.99 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo. 

Brave Enemies by Robert Morgan: As the War for Independence wore on into the 1780s, unrest ruled the Carolinas. Settlers who had cleared the land after the Cherokees withdrew were being mustered for battle as British forces pillaged their hard-won farms. Robert Morgan’s stunning novel tells a story of two people caught in the chaos raging in the wilderness.

After sixteen-year-old Josie Summers murders her abusive stepfather, she runs away from home disguised as a boy. Lost in the woods, she accepts a young preacher’s invitation to assist in his itinerant ministry. Eventually her identity is revealed and affection grows between the two. But when the preacher is kidnapped by British soldiers, Josie disguises herself once again and joins the militia in a desperate attempt to find him.

Brave Enemies is a page-turning story of people brought together by chance and torn apart by war—a story of enduring love and of the struggle to build a homeland.

This e-book includes a FREE preview from Robert Morgan’s upcoming novel, The Road from Gap Creek.

You can buy the Brave Enemies e-book for $1.99 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo. 

The Hinterlands by Robert Morgan: This is the story of a family who found, marked, and paved their way into America’s eastern frontier. Unfolding in the voices of three generations of mountaineer storytellers specializing in keeping listeners on the edges of their seats, this is fiction that plunks us down right into the thick of pioneer life. Using his own family stories as his inspiration, Robert Morgan has crafted a riveting folk history alive with adventure. Morgan’s three gifted storytellers tell it like it was–with a vengeance.

This e-book includes a FREE preview of The Road from Gap Creek.

You can buy the The Hinterlands e-book for $2.99 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Google, and Kobo. 

ROBERT MORGAN was raised on his family’s farm in the North Carolina mountains. The author of eleven books of poetry, three books of nonfiction, and eight books of fiction, including the bestselling novel Gap Creek. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University. He won the Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature in 2007.