£17.24 Hardback, £7.95 Paperback
Dana, the widow of a Pennsylvania senator, buries her husband on the morning of 9/11, not far from the site of the United 93 crash. Shocked by this grim synchronicity, she finally pulls herself together and heads south to pick up the lost strands of her youth. She reconnects with Cassius Huston, who is black, and is separated from his raging wife but devoted to his three-year-old daughter. Tentative at first, and taken by surprise, Dana and Cassius fall in love.
When Dana is threatened by Cassius’ family, she flees to the Gulf Coast, to the fishing village of Pelican Bay, to wait for him. She is soon drawn intimately into the life of the small town, with its invisible divide between black and white. She considers herself post-racial. But what does that mean for a bi-racial couple on the rural coast of Florida in the twenty-first century American South? How much heavy history persists, unacknowledged and internalised?
This beautifully-written novel of love, race, territory and renewal explores the issues that challenge us all.
“She writes like a robust angel.”
“A fine and complex novel; a comedy and then some. ”
“Burroway is a subtle novelist with a gift for jolting surprises.”
“Janet Burroway is “a writer’s writer; a prodigiously talented all American girl ... who found her literary voice in England”