Jill McCorkle is often hailed as a leading voice in the fiction of the "New South," a chronicler of the lives of everyday people whose strong connections to family and place help them to persevere through relationship woes and the travails of their seemingly prosaic, yet emotionally complicated lives. McCorkle's writing is characterized by her adeptness at catching the voice of the common person and her keen eye for detail as she precisely captures the trappings of working-class and middle-class life. Her work is often set in the small towns of what has come to be called the "New South," locales where generationally rooted sense of place is slowly giving way to the interchangeable landmarks of late-twentieth-century America: strip malls, chain restaurants and hotels, and faceless apartment complexes. Against this bland backdrop McCorkle maps her characters' lives, imbuing what might otherwise be considered a mundane existence with vitality...