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978-0-89587-238-8
0-89587-238-2
$21.95 hardcover
6" x 9"
302 pages
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"Don't
you 'Oh, Sister' me," Kathleen says. "I'm sick of this
pretending you don't remember what life was like here. Even for you, the
fair-haired daughter, it was no bed of roses."
Gertrude is
hyperventilating. "Should I get your smelling salts?" Lola
asks.
It is 1918, and the three
Holloway sisters have gathered at the family homeplace to determine the
identity of the human skeletal remains found in the millpond. Fifteen
years ago, their sister Rhoda, a free spirit who heard ghosts on the
wind and loved to climb the waterwheel at the family's gristmill,
vanished into the night, never to be heard from again.
Though Hackberry Hill is only
a couple of hours distant from the thriving Alabama city where two of
the sisters now live, it exists worlds apart. For Gertrude, the society
matron, coming home means confronting strictly repressed memories. For
Lola, the young sophisticate, it brings deep mourning for a lost loved
one. For Kathleen, the bitter sister who stayed behind, the gathering is
an interruption to both her public routine and her private passion.
Over the course of two days,
the Holloway women peel back the layers of a complicated past to arrive
at a truth that will begin to reconcile a family that has too long been
apart.
In this richly textured
novel, people--from the urbane Jason Howard to the long-dead Miss Lucy
to the earthy George Craven--are not at all what they seem on the
surface. Though often at odds, together they hold the key to solving a
mystery that is both painful and liberating.
about the author
Julia Oliver is the author of the novel Goodbye to the Buttermilk
Sky and the short story collection Seventeen Times as High as the
Moon. Her plays have been produced on stage; her numerous features,
reviews, and columns have appeared in newspapers and magazines. She
lives in Montgomery, Alabama.
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