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Published May 2011
352 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Cathy Holton, author of the popular Beach Trip, returns with an intriguing and mysterious tale of dark deeds and family secrets in a small Southern town.
After a personal tragedy, Chicago writer Ava Dabrowski quits her job to spend the summer in Woodburn, Tennessee, at the invitation of her old college friend Will Fraser and his two great-aunts, Josephine and Fanny Woodburn. Her charming hosts offer Ava a chance to relax at their idyllic ancestral estate, Woodburn Hall, while working on her first novel.
But Woodburn is anything but quiet: Ancient feuds lurk just beneath its placid surface, and modern-day rivalries emerge as Ava finds herself caught between the competing attentions of Will and his black-sheep cousin Jake. Fascinated by the family’s impressive history - their imposing house filled with treasures, and their mingling with literary lions Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner - Ava stumbles onto rumors about the darker side of the Woodburns’ legacy. Putting aside her planned novel, she turns her creative attentions to the eccentric and tragic clan, a family with more skeletons (and ghosts) in their closets than anyone could possibly imagine. As Ava struggles to write the true story of the Woodburns, she finds herself tangled in the tragic history of a mysterious Southern family whose secrets mirror her own.
"Holton's fourth novel is a carefully fitted nesting doll containing the secrets of one Southern family. ... Ava's struggles with her own past make her a wonderfully grounded narrator for a snapshot of the South as it is today: a region deeply tangled in its own history." - Publishers Weekly
"Fans of Southern fiction will lap up Holton's setting and characters." - Library Journal
"From the spry octogenarians who compose the town's old guard to the scheming Darlene who has her hat set for Will, Holton's novel is brimming with unforgettable characters, smart conversations and an engaging mystery that makes spending a summer in the South a tantalizing proposition." - Kirkus
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The daughter of a college professor and an artist, Cathy Holton grew up in college towns in the American South and Midwest. As a child, she entertained her classmates with tales of a scaled creature that lived in her carport shed and a magical phone that hung in her family's bathroom that could be used to summon an English butler (this was in North Carolina in the 1960s and her family lived in married student housing).
She studied Creative Writing at Michigan State University under Professor Albert Drake. She has worked as a dude ranch hand, a university seminar coordinator, a paralegal, and an assistant in a fire investigation firm. The mother of three grown children, she lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee with her husband and a rescue dog named Yoshi. She is the author of Revenge of the...
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