The Curing Season (Hardcover)

Also Available as an eBook

Written in a mesmerizing prose that lays bare a woman's soul, this debut novel fits firmly in the tradition of Janet Fitch's White Oleander and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. It is a haunting depiction of adversity and the forces that can help a woman break free.

THE CURING SEASON

In 1948, southern Virginia's rich tobacco country has its poor. Cora Slaughter's family is one of them. Book smart and bright, Cora has the potential to rise above her hardscrabble existence and her father's alcoholic rages. If only, she dreams, there were enough money for her to go to college, if only she weren't lame, if only the right man would fall in love with her and take her away...

But Cora is teased and tormented by her schoolmates and the boys who flock after her pretty sister. No man even looks at her-until a handsome drifter named Aaron Melville comes around seeking farmwork. Flattered by his attention, Cora begins to hope that Aaron can offer her a future. What she doesn't realize is that it will be one even more trying-and indeed terrifying-than the life she is fleeing.

As her existence with Aaron unfolds, Cora falls into a heartbreaking apathy, relieved only by moments of happiness with her young son. Then, by a clear creek that marks the border between the black community and the white, she meets an African-American woman named Nita Raines... and, in a dangerously racially divided South, finds the courage she needs to build a better life for herself and her child.

Emotionally authentic and incredibly moving, THE CURING SEASON paints a portrait of a woman rising from the very depths of despair-and shows us the restorative power of love.