Homeplace

Forced to return to her hometown in Georgia, Mike Winship Singer, a divorced free-lance artist, tries to come to terms with her past and her dying, bigoted father

A native of Lython, Ga., Micah Winship left town at age 18, after a bitter breach with her father caused by her involvement in the civil rights movement. Twenty years later, she is a noted journalist, a mother and divorcee. At a low point in her career, just as her daughter has left to spend the summer in California, Mike hears from her sister DeeDee, who writes asking for help with their dying father. In a particularly vulnerable state, Mike goes home. Brittle and sharp-edged, repelled by DeeDee's transformation into a mountainous caricature of would-be gentility, unmoved by her father's battle to stop the Department of Transportation from building a highway through his parents' farm, the "homeplace" that has never meant much to her, she intends to stay only a few weeks. But she is caught up in a passionate affair with Bayard Sewell, a shining figure in the local political firmament whom she had loved as a girl. On a trip to the farm with her father and the Bible-quoting, rough-edged lawyer who is his only supporter, Mike begins to understand the old man's attachment to the land and reluctantly agrees to join the fight. In the process she finally plumbs the depths of her own anger and falseness, finding resources of compassion and strength. About love and death, greed and passion, the pull of family and the push of self, Homeplace is a deeply moving story of a fierce and necessary forgiveness. Siddons also wrote Heartbreak Hotel and The House Next Door. 35,000 first printing; $35,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Micah Winship is a successful journalist living in New York City, a troubled childhood in small-town Georgia far behind her. Her father's illness, however, brings her back to the home she had fled in fury and disgrace 20 years earlier in the wake of a family storm concerning Micah's growing interest in the Civil Rights Movement. Now, in this hot summer visit, the past encroaches on the present, and Micah is drawn back into the family politics and sexual drama of her adolescence. For all its psychological overtones of guilt, difficult love, and the burden of childhood scars, this novel is basically a romance, complete with white knight. The prose flows easily and creates an evocative atmosphere of summer in the Deep South. Laurie Spector Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright Index Project, Cambridge, Mass.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.