Thomas Jacob Publishing Llc: 28 books

Billy May Platte is a half Irish, half Cherokee Appalachian woman who learned the hard way that 1940s West Virginia was no place to be different. As Billy May explains, "We was sheltered in them hills.  We didn't know much of nothin' about life outside of them mountains.  I did not know...

As recounted in Appalachian Justice, Jessie is an adult survivor of horrendous childhood abuse.  At the age of thirteen, she was rescued by reclusive mountain woman Billy May Platte.  Now forty-seven, Jessie is outwardly successful but inwardly struggles to reconcile the broken pieces of...

Beth Sloan has spent the majority of her life trying to escape the memories of a difficult childhood. Born into the infamous Pritchett family of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, she grew up hard, surrounded not only by homemade stills and corn liquor, but by an impoverished family that more often than...

On the anniversary of her husband's death, forty-nine-year-old Emily Holt runs away, leaving an unmade bed, an unlocked house, two college-aged sons, and an overabundance of bad memories. Struggling to make peace with the death of a husband who'd been lost to mental illness, she vows to drive...

Blessed Are the Wholly Broken is the harrowing story of a modern family in the midst of self-destruction. After the heartbreak of losing their newborn son to a previously undiagnosed genetic condition, Phillip and Anna Lewinsky manage to pick up the pieces of their broken lives and move forward,...

On a sweltering July morning in rural Tennessee, fifty-year-old Rebecca Reynolds visits the family farm, where she literally stumbles across the mutilated bodies of her parents and younger sister, a sister who had spent life in a wheelchair after a birth fraught with complications. Rebecca's...

On a beautiful fall evening, in the middle of a game of hide-and-seek, five-year-old Bobby Clark is kidnapped by his estranged father, a shiftless man with a history of domestic violence and drug abuse. Bobby’s twin brother Ricky watches, terrified, from his hiding place behind the bougainvillea,...

The Cedar Hollow Series features the residents of the tiny coal-mining town of Cedar Hollow, West Virginia, over the span of eighty years. Appalachian Justice chronicles the life of Billy May Platte, who, in 1945 when she was fourteen years old and orphaned, was brutally attacked by a group...

Leap:  a brave woman prepares to take her final journey. Breathe:  how many people can pinpoint the precise time their marriage died; can repeat verbatim the words that sent the marriage plunging into the grave? Goodbye, Emily Dickinson:  Sometimes the delusion is what helps us get...

Torreya, a small 1950s Florida Panhandle town, is losing its men. They disappear on nights with no moon and no witnesses. Foreclosure signs appear in their yards the following day while thugs associated with the Klan take everything of value from inside treasured homes that will soon be torn down....

Lena, a shamanistic cat, and her conjure woman Eulalie live in a small town near the Apalachicola River in Florida’s lightly populated Liberty County, where longleaf pines own the world. In Eulalie’s time, women of color look after white children in the homes of white families and are respected,...

“The way I see it,” said Daniel, “the fence lizard eats the fly, so the fly becomes part of the fence lizard. The fly is the fence lizard. The fence lizard gets eaten by the snake, and thus becomes the snake. What’s to say that snake won’t get snatched up by a Golden Eagle, and thus become the eagle?” Does the same principle apply to humans? Marina is about to find out.

With Looking for the Sun Door, Tracy R. Franklin combines her poetry with short fiction and shows us what it means to be broken, whole, and pasted together. With her poetry, she uses her confessional style to explore the universal challenges of trying to understand one’s relationship to oneself,...

Few of the eccentric inhabitants of her father's Main Line, Philadelphia estate have much time for Fleur Robins, an awkward child with a devotion to her ailing grandfather, a penchant for flapping and whirling, and a preoccupation with God and the void.  While her mother spends much of her...