Author(s): Deborah Smith

Fiction

Deborah Smith's is one of the most imaginative and appealing new voices in Southern fiction.  In the tradition ofFried Green Tomatoes,the nationally bestselling author offers a deliciously original new novel that will make you laugh one moment and then move you to tears--an irresistible Southern saga that chronicles a love as innocent as a child's and as powerful as that of two star-crossed lovers can be. "I planned to be the kind of old Southern lady who talks to her tomato plants and buys sweaters for her cats.  I'd be deliberately peculiar.  I'd wear bright red lipstick and tell embarrassing true stories about my family, and people would say,I heard she was always a little funny, if you know what I mean.  They wouldn't understand why, and I didn't intend to tell them." At thirty, Claire Maloney knows her life has become a major-league wreck.  And she knows why it all started falling apart, too.  Because Roan Sullivan was banished from Dunderry, Georgia, twenty years ago, and Claire hasn't heard from him since.  She was only ten then, and Roan fifteen, but what happened to the two of them is the stuff of local legend, as vivid and dramatic as anything can be in a small town where people hoard sad stories as carefully as their great-grandmother's china. Back then, Roan Sullivan lived in a trailer amid junked cars and rusted tin cans, while Claire was the willful, pampered young daughter of the town's most respected family.  So no one--least of all her parents--understood the bond that tied her to the fierce, motherless boy who had to fight every day for his place in the world.  But Roan and Claire didn't choose one another; they belonged together, as involuntarily and permanently as the soil and the seed from which the foxgloves grew on the side of Dunshinnog Mountain.  They were simply a part of the place, and a part of each other. Until the dark afternoon when violence and terror overtook them, and Roan disappeared from Claire's life.  Now, twenty years later, Claire is adrift, and the Maloneys are still hoping the past can be buried forever under the rich Southern earth.  But Roan Sullivan is about to walk back into their lives. By turns tender and sexy and heartbreaking and exuberant,A Place to Call Home  is an unforgettable journey between two hearts.  It is a book to read, and reread, and cherish. >A Place to Call Homehas the magic of great storytelling.