A dissection of family existence at its most corrosive

In this moving and brilliant narrative of doomed love, Mary Lee Settle tells of a triangular affair set in the small town of Canona, West Virginia. The novel’s narrator, a thirty-five-year-old widow and writer, returns from a self-imposed European exile to find her hometown much as she left it decades ago. One thing does change upon her arrival, however; she takes Charley Bland, Canona’s most eligible bachelor and the object of her schoolgirl crush, as her lover. The third person in the profane trinity is Charley’s mother, a woman who believes no female worthy of her son. Mrs. Bland serves to fuel the lovers’ creativity as they arrange clandestine meetings. With trademark skill and wit, Settle spins a bittersweet story in which she artfully reveals the mores of Canona’s closed, upper-class society and of its less prosperous underculture.