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Ballantine Books
June 2011
On Sale: May 24, 2011
Featuring: Ava Dabrowski; Will Fraser
368 pages
ISBN: 0345506014
EAN: 9780345506016
Hardcover
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Women's Fiction Contemporary
Cathy Holton, author of the popular Beach Trip, returns with an intriguing and mysterious tale of dark deeds and family secrets in a small Southern town. After a personal tragedy, Chicago writer Ava Dabrowski quits her job to spend the summer in Woodburn, Tennessee, at the invitation of her old college friend Will Fraser and his two great-aunts, Josephine and Fanny Woodburn. Her charming hosts offer Ava a chance to relax at their idyllic ancestral estate, Woodburn Hall, while working on her first novel. But Woodburn is anything but quiet: Ancient feuds lurk just beneath its placid surface, and modern-day rivalries emerge as Ava finds herself caught between the competing attentions of Will and his black-sheep cousin Jake. Fascinated by the familyβs impressive historyβtheir imposing house filled with treasures, and their mingling with literary lions Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and FaulknerβAva stumbles onto rumors about the darker side of the Woodburnsβ legacy. Putting aside her planned novel, she turns her creative attentions to the eccentric and tragic clan, a family with more skeletons (and ghosts) in their closets than anyone could possibly imagine. As Ava struggles to write the true story of the Woodburns, she finds herself tangled in the tragic history of a mysterious Southern family whose secrets mirror her own.
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