Butterfly Weed (Paperback)

"Inspired, playful storytelling from one of our most consistently original (and impish) novelists who now returns to his Ozark version of Shangri-la?the village of Stay More, a place hard to find but infinitely harder to leave. This latest installment, a history of the complex love life and remarkable medical achievements of Doc Colvin Swain, Stay More's "dreaming Doctor, '' is no different: Apprenticed as a young boy to a hill doctor, he learns to use both a wide range of herbal remedies and conventional cures. The most painful irony of Swain's career is that beautiful, beloved Tenny, the true love of his life, is the one patient he can't save. She dies, horribly, of tuberculosis. But, this being Stay More, she lingers on as a spirit, watching over Doc, waiting for him. Such material would evaporate in the hands of a lesser novelist. But Harington, an ingenious, wise storyteller and a sly stylist, able to catch the tang and vigor of the spoken word, makes Doc and the other inhabitants of Stay More seem as real as the mountains they inhabit and also as mysteriously timeless." Kirkus Reviews