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Tawni O`Dell

Born: 1964 in Indiana, Pennsylvania
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Tawni O'Dell graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism and spent many years living in the Chicago area before moving back to Pennsylvania where she now lives with her two children and her husband.

Biography: Tawni was born and raised in the coal-mining region of western Pennsylvania, the territory she writes about with such striking authenticity.


Awards:
  • -- ''New York Times'' bestselling author of the novels ''Sister Mine'', ''Coal Run'', and ''Back Roads'', which was an Oprah's Book Club pick and a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection
  • -- ''Back Roads'' is currently in development to be made into a film by M

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

Website: http://www.tawniodell.com/
Tawni O`Dell on WorldCat : http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=tawni+o%60dell


Selected Titles

Back roads
ISBN: 9781101209271 OCLC: 773612963

New American Library, New York : 2004, ©2000.

One day you're that guy who's happy he managed to survive high school and get that almighty piece of paper, and you're thinking you might try to get a job at Redi-Mix concrete where your dad's worked since the beginning of time. And at least you've got a family you can stand even if they are all sisters. One day you're that guy, and the next day you're assigned to a social worker and a therapist and given the choice of either being a LEGAL ADULT with three DEPENDENTS or an ORPHAN with NOBODY.?From Back Roads Harley Altmyer should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his closed-minded, stricken coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's constantly reminded of just how messed up his life is. With his mother in jail for killing his abusive father, Harley is an orphan with the responsibilities of an adult and the fiery, aggressive libido of a teenager. Just nineteen years old, he's marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three younger sisters, whose feelings about him range from stifling dependence to loathing. And once he develops an obsession with the sexy, melancholic mother of two living down the road, those Victoria's Secret catalogs just won't do the trick anymore. He wants Callie Mercer so badly he fears he will explode. But it's the family secrets, the lies, and the unspoken truths that light the fuse and erupt into a series of staggering surprises, leaving what's left of his family in tatters. Through every ordeal, the unforgettable Harley could never know that his endearing humor, his love for his sisters, and his bumbling heroics would redeem them all. Funny and heartbreaking, Tawni O'Dell's pitch-perfect characters capture the maddening confusion of adolescence and the prickly nature of family with irony and unerring honesty. Back Roads is a riveting novel by a formidable new talent.

Coal Run :
ISBN: 067089995X OCLC: 53132402

Viking, New York : 2004.

Coal mining community deputy Ivan Zoschenko remembers the injury that ended his football career, prepares for a former teammate's release from prison, and confronts a secret that has troubled his conscience.

Fragile beasts :
ISBN: 0307351688 OCLC: 297147170

Shaye Areheart Books, New York : ©2010.

When their hard-drinking, but loving, father dies in a car accident, teenage brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes face a bleak prospect: leaving their Pennsylvania hometown for an uncertain life in Arizona with the mother who ran out on them years ago. But in a strange twist of fate, their town's matriarch, an eccentric, wealthy old woman whose family once owned the county coal mines, hears the boys' story. Candace Jack doesn't have an ounce of maternal instinct, yet for reasons she does not even understand herself, she is compelled to offer them a home. Suddenly, the two boys go from living in a small, run-down house on a gravel road to a stately mansion filled with sumptuous furnishings and beautiful artwork--artwork that's predominantly centered, oddly, on bullfighting. And then there's Miss Jack's real-life bull: Ventisco--a regal, hulking, jet-black beast who roams the land she owns with fiery impudence.

  Sister mine
ISBN: 9780719556777 OCLC: 271603922

John Murray, London : ©2008.

Set in the mining town of Jolly Mount, Pennsylvania, Sister Mine is told in the wry, honest and sometimes heartbreakingly poignant voice of Shae-Lynn Penrose, offbeat ex-cop and now sole proprietor of the local cab company. Two years previously, five of Shae-Lynn's friends were thrust into the media spotlight when the pit in which they were working exploded. They survived five days underground and emerged as heroes - but neither they nor their town have ever been the same since.--Cover.

Sister mine :
ISBN: 030735167X OCLC: 68965652

Shaye Areheart Books, New York : ©2007.

Shae-Lynn Penrose has spent years building a life for herself and her son in Jolly Mount, Pennsylvania, the tiny coal-mining town in which she grew up, but her life is thrown into disarray by the arrival of the younger sister she had thought dead.

 

 

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