Swan

By the #1 bestselling author ofUnder the Tuscan Sun, Bella TuscanyandIn Tuscany, Swanis a haunting novel set in the deep South -- a resonant tale of long-buried family secrets and mysteries brought suddenly to light. In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. InSwan, her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her southern roots. The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an edenic, hidebound small town in Georgia. AsSwanopens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archeologist in Italy: The body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years before, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, the Mason children grapple with the profound effects of their mother's life and death on their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine's death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface as well, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths about their family, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that wants to keep the past buried. Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the deep South while telling an utterly compelling story of the complexity of family ties,Swanmarks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America's best-loved writers. From the Hardcover edition.

<b>Frances Mayes’</b>s Tuscany memoirs, all published by Broadway Books, have a combined total of 2,000,000 copies in print. She is also the author of <i>The Discovery of Poetry </i>and five books of poetry. A native of Georgia, she now divides her time between San Francisco and Cortona, Italy.<br><b><br></b><br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>