Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People
What Is Otherwise Infinite

Charity and Sylvia

An openly Lesbian couple survives and thrives in 19th century Vermont–a true story, as told by Tillie Walden

The month is February in the year 1807. The place is Weybridge, Vermont: small, cold, lonely, and beautiful. Sylvia Drake is exhausted. As an unwed woman with few prospects, she is residing with and caring for her sister’s rambunctious family. Today the house is abuzz awaiting a guest—Charity Bryant. A friend of the family, she is most known for her elegant letters, with their swoopy and evocative penmanship and carefully chosen prose. But Charity’s visit is a guise, she is coming to Vermont to start over after heartbreak and rumours—so many rumours—that have grown too loud back in Massachusetts.

Being openly gay in 19th century New England is not an easy row to hoe. But Charity can only be herself, and she immediately catches—and holds—the eye of none other than Sylvia Drake. From this point on, for 44 years, the two would be inseparable, building a life together despite all odds and living as a lesbian couple in small town Vermont.

The true, exceptional story of these remarkable women is brought to life with humor and passion by the unparalleled and award-winning Tillie Walden (Spinning, On A Sunbeam). We see America grow alongside these women over a period that brings about the railroad, many novels, 14 Presidents, riots, rebellion, plagues, and poetry. Based on extensive archives of their writing, Charity and Sylvia is a groundbreaking biography that is also the story of 19th century America.

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. This is the unforgettable story of how Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die.

  • Nothing in the world soothes the soul better than Gospel music.

  • A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

  • In James, when the enslaved Jim learns he is to be sold in New Orleans, he hides on Jackson Island to devise a plan for escape. Meanwhile, Huck Finn, having faked his own death, embarks on a perilous journey down the Mississippi River, intertwining their fates as they confront themes of freedom and agency in a reimagined narrative of American literature.

    Read More about "James"...