The Tie that Binds - Kent Haruf
       Oldest on TBR

The opening scene is Edith, an 80 year old, lying in a hospital bed with a police guard and a charge of murder.
  That is all we know.

Her neighbor, Sanders Roscoe, invites us to sit at his kitchen table and tells us Edith's life story, her hard life on a farm in Holt, Colorado .

For a debut novel, this was very well-written.  I felt like I was right there at the table with Sanders learning about Edith's young life with her difficult father, her quiet brother, and her adult years still on the family farm.  And how it ended up with the murder charge against Edith.

Goodreads says :

Colorado, January 1977. Eighty-year-old Edith Goodnough lies in a hospital bed, IV taped to the back of her hand, police officer at her door. She is charged with murder. The clues: a sack of chicken feed slit with a knife, a milky-eyed dog tied outdoors one cold afternoon. The motives: the brutal business of farming and a family code of ethics as unforgiving as the winter prairie itself.

In his critically acclaimed first novel, Kent Haruf delivers the sweeping tale of a woman of the American High Plains, as told by her neighbor, Sanders Roscoe. As Roscoe shares what he knows, Edith's tragedies unfold: a childhood of pre-dawn chores, a mother's death, a violence that leaves a father dependent on his children, forever enraged. Here is the story of a woman who sacrifices her happiness in the name of family--and then, in one gesture, reclaims her freedom. Breathtaking, determinedly truthful, The Tie That Binds is a powerfully eloquent tribute to the arduous demands of rural America, and of the tenacity of the human spirit.