Gail Godwin

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...

Every evening at five o’clock, Christina and Rudy stopped work and began the ritual commonly known as Happy Hour. Rudy mixed Christina’s drink with loving precision, the cavalier slosh of Bombay Sapphire over ice shards, before settling across from her in his Stickley chair with his glass of Scotch. They shared a love of language and music (she is an author, he a composer, after all), a delight in intense conversation, a fascination with...

This profound portrait of family life takes listeners inside the hearts and minds of members of the Quick family, whose raw-edged emotions are stirred up by a visit home. An inexplicably violent death and painful confrontations leave every family member forever changed. Rich in insight and psychological entanglements, A Southern Family is a masterful tale of anger and pain, of love and hatred, and ultimately of healing, understanding, and wisdom.

"A personal story of a writer's hunger to be published, the pursuit of that goal, and then the long haul--for Gail Godwin, forty-five years of being a published writer and all that goes with it. A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1958, Godwin met with Knopf scouts who came to campus every spring in search of new talent. Though her five pages of Windy Peaks were turned down and the novel never completed, she would go on...

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.

A flamboyant woman professor holds court as she lies dying from cancer. The novel traces the effect she has on the people around her: her self-effacing, much younger husband who left the priesthood to marry her, another professor who is suffering from writer's block, and the professor's wife who is falling in love with the ex-priest. By the author of Father Melancholy's Daughter.