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978-0-89587-224-1
0-89587-224-2
$17.95 paperback
6" x 9"
379 pages
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A novel that
lingers in the heart. --Publishers Weekly
"You listen to me, my
girl," Ruth Douglass warns her rebellious daughter. "You've
only got three choices in this world, and only three. A woman can be a
virgin, a wife, or a widow."
Ruth's entire life testifies to the contrary.
Born a good Mormon in genteel
Salt Lake City, Ruth feels religiously compelled to marry Samuel
Douglass, a man she scarcely knows. She follows him into the Idaho
wilderness of the 1890s. Bearing her children unwillingly, Ruth grapples
with frontier life while her husband descends into madness, receiving
revelations from God. In a desperate bid for freedom, Ruth and her
children flee to the desert town of St. Elmo, California. There, she
builds a life and lives a lie: the Widow Douglass.
Her courage elicits the
admiration of the cigar-smoking Doctor Lucius Tipton. Scientist,
atheist, a man with a breadth of intellect and a depth of heart, Lucius
has frequently defied St. Elmo's pieties, and does so again, falling in
love with Ruth. As their affections deepen, Lucius enters into the lives
of Ruth's contentious brood: six children whose destinies take them in
very different directions, some to tragedy.
A complex novel of revelation
and rebellion, These Latter Days explores the ways in which
families root us, ground us, and compel us to seek freedom.
about the author
These Latter Days is the first of Laura Kalpakian's St. Elmo
novels, which include Graced Land and Caveat.
Winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Award and two Pacific
Northwest Booksellers' Awards for Excellence, Kalpakian is a California
native.
Click
here to learn more about Laura Kalpakian's other St. Elmo title, Caveat.
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