Choices - Softcover

Settle, Mary Lee

3.73

73 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156003880 ISBN 13: 9780156003889

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 2009

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When Melinda Kregg, a young southern belle, witnesses the bloody Kentucky mining strikes of the 1930s, her innocence is shattered. This saga chronicles her joys, sorrows, and ministrations to the social wound on her journey through the maelstrom of the twentieth century. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Awarded the 1995 Lillian Smith Book Award.

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From the Publisher:

A novel of an extraordinary woman and her extraordinary times, by the distinguished author of The Beulah Quintet and Celebration.

"Audaciously insightful... Ambitious, unique, and beautifully written." -- Ann Beattie.

In this, her thirteenth novel, National Book Award-winning author Mary Lee Settle takes the measure of the twentieth century, as seen and lived by Melinda Kregg Dunston, a brave and remarkable woman of the South. When her father kills himself during the Depression so that his family can live on his insurance money, Melinda realizes that she will not be happy leading the genteel life desired for her by her mother. Joining the Red Cross rather than making her debut, she becomes embroiled in a bloody coal-miners' strike in Kentucky, where she witnesses firsthand a poverty and desperation she scarcely knew existed. Then she volunteers for the Republican cause in Spain, where amid the horrors of war she falls in love with and marries Tye Dunston, an idealistic young doctor. As the war reaches its tragic end, she escapes Spain with barely her life and a demure little orphaned girl in tow. And in the turbulent sixties, she returns to America to champion the civil rights cause, aiding a brilliant young man whose only crime is his skin color. A narrative borne on the exhilarating currents of memory, Choices is not only the story of a courageous woman who puts compassion ahead of society's expectations of her, it is also the story of this century, told with an unflinching eye and an unstinting heart.

About the Author:

Mary Lee Settle (July 29, 1918 - September 27, 2005) was an American writer and winner of the National Book Award for her 1978 novel Blood Tie. She was also one of the founders of the annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Settle was born in Charleston, West Virginia. She attended Sweet Briar College for two years, then moved to New York City in pursuit of a career as an actress and model, and even tested for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. Settle lived for many years in Canada, in England, and in Turkey.

Settle is most famous for a series of novels called the "Beulah Quintet", which cover the history of West Virginia, and thus by implication, the United States. She also wrote several works of non-fiction.

She died of lung cancer in Ivy, Virginia, near Charlottesville.

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