In 1878, twelve-year-old Ida Kate and her widowed father welcome a mail-order bride and her baby to their Kansas homestead, but Ida Kate soon suspects that the bride is not the woman with whom Papa has corresponded.

Attending her niece's confirmation, Lottie Albright finds herself in the middle of a mystery after Rev. Mary Farnsworth flees the service and is found dead.

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past.

Annabelle Aster doesn't bow to convention-not even that of space and time-which makes the 1890s Kansas wheat field has appeared in her modern-day San Francisco garden easy to accept. Even more peculiar is Elsbeth, the truculent schoolmarm who sends Annie letters through the mysterious brass mailbox perched on the picket fence that now divides their two worlds.

The Ingalls family packs up their covered wagon and travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home in Kansas Territory, where wide open land stretches as far as the eye can see. On the prairie, they build a house, meet neighboring Indians, build a well, and fight a prairie fire.

V.I. Warshawski travels to Kansas to investigate the disappearances of a young film student and a faded Hollywood star, but long-simmering racial tensions stir up more mysteries as the body count rises.

Marilynne Robinson discusses and reads from her book Gilead with James Wood.

Big Jake Motley had been running the Big M spread in Texas for over 30 years. In that time, he's driven thousands of head of cattle to market in Kansas. Now, while both the Nineteenth century and the era of trail drive are coming to an end, Big Jake is determined to make one last drive to Kansas. The only thing is, he doesn't have the cowhands to move that much beef. He drafts his old friend, Chance McCandles, into service, and together, the two aging...