Böcker av Janice Holt Giles

Hill Man, set in the Kentucky Hills, is the story of the ambitious and lustful Rady Cromwell and three women. According to Giles, Rady was emblematic of men in his time and place, "men who know no law but their own wills and desires, and have no evidence of conscience. Rady is no fiction. He is fact." Hill Man was the only novel Janice Holt Giles wrote using a pseudonym. Although appreciative of her first publisher, the religiously oriented Westminster Press, she became increasingly dismayed that editors trimmed her books down "to pure sweetness and light." Hill Man was her most provocative work and also allowed her to experiment in the racier mass market paperback genre. Citing concern for her burgeoning reputation (having published her first four books with a religious publisher and the last with Houghton Mifflin), Janice elected to use the pseudonym John Garth. After Hill Man, she settled in to producing the historical fiction that for the most part defined her literary career.

This is the story of Tara Cochrane, who had been Hod's captain during World War II. On Piney Ridge, Tara meets Jory, a minister of the Church of the Brethren of Christ, a sect popularly know as the White Caps because of the little caps worn by the women members.

Janice Holt Giles had a life before her marriage and writing career in Kentucky. At age forty-eight -- the same age as Giles at the writing of the novel -- the heroine Katie Rogers recalls her first visit alone to her grandparent's home in Stanwick, Arkansas.

In an emotional climax Regina must decide if she loves Michael enough to give him up or if she'll force him to choose between her and God. By modern standards, Giles's love scenes are tasteful, and the general atmosphere of ecumenism within today's Catholic Church renders moot many of the tensions in the novel.

In her fourth novel of the Kentucky frontier, Giles combines her fascination for the past with her gift for storytelling. Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years.

In the novel Hannah Fowler, Janice Holt Giles created a pioneer woman who would, In Giles's words, "endow her own physical seed with her strength and courage, and her own tenderness and love." When Samuel dies, Tice takes Hannah to the fort, where women are scarce, and Hannah finds herself besieged by suitors.

In the late 1940s, Janice and Henry Giles moved from Louisville, Kentucky, back to the Appalachian hill country where Henry had grown up and where his family had lived since the time of the Revolution.

Miss Willie, first published in 1951, is part of Giles's Piney Ridge Trilogy. Zealously, she tries to change the ways of the stubborn and proud Appalachian people, but to no avail. This is a story of reconciliation and the coming together of two different ways of life.