"It is rare when a book this fine enters the world of contemporary
American literature." - *The Boston Globe
*
Two women share a Mississippi household for fifteen years, rolling out
piecrusts and making conversation. Cornelia is rich, white, and
pampered, the mistress of the house, who oversees a seemingly perfect
world of smooth surfaces and stubborn silence. Tweet, her housekeeper,
is a poor, black, world-weary woman with a ghost-ridden past. As the
years go by, Cornelia and Tweet each endure moments of uncertainty and
despair; each, in her time of need, is rescued by the other.
In the footsteps of Southern writers like Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty,
and Flannery O'Connor, Ellen Douglas celebrates the resiliency of the
human spirit in this story of two women bound by transgression and
guilt, memory and illusion, gratitude and love.
"Ellen Douglas is not just one of our best Southern novelists. She is
one of our best American novelists." - *The New York Times Book Review
*