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Scribner
October 2012
On Sale: October 9, 2012
288 pages
ISBN: 1451674635
EAN: 9781451674637
Kindle: B007EDOKRA
Hardcover / e-Book
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Historical | Fiction Family Life
JOLIE HOYT IS A GOOD SOUTHERN GIRL living in Hendrix, a small Florida Panhandle town. The daughter of a Pentecostal preacher who sells insurance on the side, and the best friend of a lively beauty who moves to the big city to pursue a career in interior design, Jolie is all too aware of her familyβs closet full of secrets and long-held distrust of outsiders. Nevertheless, she throws caution to the wind when she meets Sam Lense, a Jewish anthropology student from Miami, who is in town to study the ethnic makeup of the region. Jolie and Sam fall recklessly in love and dream of beginning a life together, far away from Jolieβs buried past. But their affair ends abruptly when Sam is discovered to have pried too deeply into Hendrixβs dark racial history and he becomes the latest victim in a long tradition of small-town violence. Twelve years later, when a black businessman from Memphis returns to Hendrix to do right by his fatherβs memory, Jolie and Sam are brought together again. They are forced to revisit the unresolved issues of their young love and finally shed light on the ugly history of Jolieβs hometown. A complex and compulsively readable Southern saga, continuing in the tradition established by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and brought into the new millennium by writers like Karen Russell and Kathryn Stockett, American Ghost was inspired by Janis Owensβs extensive research on a real lynching that occurred in 1934 in Marianna, Florida. American Ghost is a richly woven exploration of how the events of our past haunt our present.
 Media BuzzMorning Edition - December 13, 2012
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