Author:
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Inc
Published: Nov 1997
Genre: Fiction - Literary
Retail Price: $14.95
Pages: 176
Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1997: Gibbons's novel, A Virtuous Woman, takes place in the same hardscrabble part of the world as Ellen Foster. The virtuous woman is Ruby Pitt Woodrow, a woman who might have ended up like Ellen Foster's mother if fate, in the shape of Jack Stokes, hadn't crossed her path. The daughter of prosperous farmers, Ruby runs off with a migrant worker who treats her badly, then abandons her far from home. When she meets Jack, a man 20 years her senior, she's working as a cleaning woman in another prosperous farmer's house. Jack is a man women don't look at even once, let alone twice; Ruby is a woman who needs someone to take care of her. Out of this unlikely union grows a quiet kind of love that is no less powerful for being unstated.
Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman share more than just location and a few characters in common. Though each is a complete novel in and of itself, taken together the two books resonate one another: Ellen Foster and Ruby Pitt Woodrow are both damaged people who find the kind of love they need to heal. These multilayered novels are tough-minded and resolutely unsentimental, just like their protagonists. Yet like Ellen and Ruby, each contains a nut of sweetness at its core that takes the bitter edge off the hard lives and hard stories Kaye Gibbons has to tell.
A brilliant and beautiful contemporary novel about love and memory from the author of the bestselling novels All He Ever Wanted and The Pilots...
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she...
...Ann-Marie MacDonald writes of several generations of a Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia family in this resonant first novel....Ms. MacDonald...
Jacob Jankowski, 90 years old and living in a nursing home, tells how, orphaned and penniless during the Great Depression, he became an animal trainer...
Set in 1956, this is the story of Icy, a 10-year-old girl with Tourette's syndrome who has been raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky by her...
Delia Hopkins is living a placid enough life in New Hampshire with her little daughter, and is about to finally marry the child's father, Eric, a...
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing...