A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick

The beloved American classic about a young girl’s coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century.

From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for growing up in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn, New York demanded fortitude, precocity, and strength of spirit. Often scorned by neighbors for her family’s erratic and eccentric behavior–such as her father Johnny’s taste for alcohol and Aunt Sissy’s habit of marrying serially without the formality of divorce–no one, least of all Francie, could say that the Nolans’ life lacked drama.

By turns heartbreaking and uplifting, the Nolans’ daily experiences are raw with honestly and tenderly threaded with family connectedness. Betty Smith has, in the pages of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, captured the joys of humble Williamsburg life–from “junk day” on Saturdays, when the children traded their weekly take for pennies, to the special excitement of holidays, bringing cause for celebration and revelry. Smith has created a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as deeply resonant moments of universal experience. Here is an American classic that “cuts right to the heart of life,” hails the New York Times. “If you miss A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, you will deny yourself a rich experience.”

From Betty Smith, author of the beloved American classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, comes an unsentimental yet radiant and uplifting tale of young love and marriage.

In 1927, in Brooklyn, New York, Carl Brown and Annie McGairy meet and fall in love. Though only eighteen, Annie travels alone halfway across the country to the Midwestern university where Carl is studying law–and there they marry.

But Carl and Annie’s first year together is much more difficult than they anticipated as they find themselves in a faraway place with little money and few friends. With hardship and poverty weighing heavily upon them, they come to realize that their greatest sources of strength, loyalty, and love, will help them make it through.

A moving and unforgettable story, Joy in the Morning is “a glad affirmation that love can accomplish the impossible.” (Chicago Tribune)

Betty Smith, the beloved author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, weaves a riveting modern myth out of the experiences of her own life in this rediscovered classic.

In Brooklyn’s unforgiving urban jungle, Maggie Moore is torn between answering her own needs and catering to the desirous men who dominate her life. Confronted by her quarrelsome Irish immigrant father, the feckless lover who may become her husband, and others, Maggie must learn to navigate a cycle of loss, separation, and hope as she forges her own path toward happiness.

With characteristic warmth, compelling insight, and easy, conversational prose, Maggie-Now poignantly illuminates one woman’s struggles and successes as she grapples with timeless questions of desire, duty, self-sacrifice, and the quest for fulfillment. Maggie-Now is an unforgettable masterpiece from one of the twentieth century’s greatest talents.

“A rediscovered treasure.” — Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post

From Betty Smith, author of the beloved classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, comes a poignant story of love, marriage, poverty, and hope set in 1920s Brooklyn.

Tomorrow Will Be Better tells the story of Margy Shannon, a shy but joyfully optimistic young woman just out of school who lives with her parents and witnesses how a lifetime of hard work, poverty, and pain has worn them down. Her mother’s resentment toward being a housewife and her father’s inability to express his emotions result in a tense home life where Margy has no voice. Unable to speak up against her overbearing mother, Margy takes refuge in her dreams of a better life.

Her goals are simple–to find a husband, have children, and live in a nice home–one where her children will never know the terror of want or the need to hide from quarreling parents. When she meets Frankie Malone, she thinks her dreams might be fulfilled, but a devastating loss rattles her to her core and challenges her life-long optimism. As she struggles to come to terms with the unexpected path her life has taken, Margy must decide whether to accept things as they are or move firmly in the direction of what she truly wants.

Rich with the flavor of its Brooklyn background, and filled with the joys and heartbreak of family life, Tomorrow Will Be Better is told with a simplicity, tenderness, and warmhearted humor that only Betty Smith could write.