A Southern Family - Softcover

Godwin, Gail

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380703130 ISBN 13: 9780380703135

Publisher: Avon Books, 1995

Synopsis

After Theodore Quick, twenty-eight, and his girlfriend, Jeanette, are found dead with all the evidence pointing to Theo himself, his family must reevaluate itself

About this title

About the Author:

Gail Godwin is the author of ten novels, three of which were nominated for National Book Awards. A Southern Family and Father Melancholy's Daughter were both NYT bestsellers and Main Selections of the Book of the Month Club. She has been translated into 12 languages. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and letters. She holds a doctorate in Modern Letters from the University of Iowa and has taught in the Iowa writers Workshop, Vassar and Columbia. A native of Asheville, N.C., she now lives in Woodstock, N.Y.

From Publishers Weekly:

"All families have themselves problems," says Snow Mullins, one of the marvelously defined characters in this rich, rewarding novel, surely Godwin's best to date. Snow herself is one of the Quick family's problems: Theo Quick has married the uneducated (but shrewd) hillbilly woman to the chagrin of his upper-middle-class parents and siblings. Ralph and Lily Quick are not role models: their marriage has been deteriorating for many years, and their house on Quick's Hill in Mountain City, S.C., mirrors both their aspiring gentility and general decline. When Theo, separated from Snow, shoots another woman who apparently has rejected him, the shocking and never fully explained event is a catalyst for many changes and insights in the survivors' lives. Both Clare Quick, Lily's daughter by a first marriage, and Rafe, the younger brother, are plagued with guilt over their failures to heed Theo's desperation. Throughout the leisurely narrative, Godwin examines the traditional concept of family, and speculates on filial duty versus the need to live an independent life; she comments on Southerners as a particular breed, on the solace of Catholicism, and on the essential inscrutability of human relationships. Because Clare is a successful author who muses about her craft, one is very conscious of a writer's sensibility here. "The kind of fiction I was trying to write," Clare says, is deep breathing, reflective and with . . . a patience for detail." She also refers to the quality of "compassionate understanding." Those words describe this wise, humane, immensely appealing novel very well. 150,000 first printing; $200,000 ad/promo.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Avon Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0380703130
• ISBN 13: 9780380703135
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 595