by Kaye Gibbons
An eleven-year-old girl must rely on wit and courage to survive in this award-winning debut novel, an Oprah Book Club selection.
"When I was little, I would think of ways to kill my daddy." With that opening sentence we enter the childhood world of one of the most appealing young heroines in contemporary fiction. Her courage, her humor, and her wisdom are unforgettable as she tells her own story with stunning honesty and insight. This powerful novel, first published in 1987, has become an American classic.
Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters's Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation's Citation for Fiction.
"A moving and ultimately uplifting story." —New York Newsday
"Endearing...with carefully sustained narrative and knowing humor." —Philadelphia Inquirer
This information about Ellen Foster (Oprah's Book Club) was first featured
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Kaye Gibbons is an American novelist. Her first novel, Ellen Foster (1987), received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Special Citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Prize in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gibbons is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and two of her books, Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman, were selected for Oprah's Book Club in 1998.
Gibbons was born in Nash County, North Carolina, and went to Rocky Mount Senior High School. She attended North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying American and English literature. She has three daughters.

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