Gail Godwin

Seven months after the unexpected death of her husband, Christina reflects on their nearly thirty years of life together, the vital bond between them, and her grief.

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

In 1959, as the first wave of Cuban exiles arrives in the United States, Emma Gant, finally free of her stifling family and bullying stepfather, embarks on a career as a reporter and begins to thrive in the sultry world of Miami.

An Anglican priestess in North Carolina finds her role threatened by a fiery evangelist, also a woman. It happens in a town in the Smoky Mountains where Margaret Bonner runs an Episcopal ministry. The area is plagued by social unrest and fundamentalist preacher Grace Munger is muscling in, claiming her brand of religion will bring hope. By the author of Father Melancholy's Daughter.

After his mother's death, eleven-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there thirty years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life. Eventually she was inspired to take up painting so she could capture its utter desolation.The...