Showing results by narrator "Kaye Gibbons" in All Categories

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons' award-winning first novel. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heartwrenching novel."

Autumn, 1918: Rumors of peace are spreading across America, but spreading even faster are the first cases of Spanish influenza, whispering of the epidemic to come. Maureen Ross, well past a safe childbearing age, is experiencing a difficult pregnancy. Her husband, Troop (cold and careless of her condition) is an emotional cripple who has battered her spirit throughout their marriage. As Maureen's time grows near, she becomes convinced she will die in childbirth.

When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was a carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.

Meet three extraordinary women: Charlie Kate, a renowned folk healer; Sophia, her spirited daughter; and Margaret, her inquisitive granddaughter. For them, home is the best house in the worst part of town - a sanctuary where life is both celebrated and mourned...and a place where a strong, uncompromising love can hold off the misery that lines up outside the door.

Kaye Gibbons' award-winning novels of Southern family life have won rave reviews coast to coast. Now, she tells the "story of family dislocation and crisis in restrained prose of unflinching clarity, with a honing eye for the small domestic details that conjure a time, place, and emotional atmosphere," according to Publishers Weekly.