Detailed item info | Synopsis | Ten years ago, Delia fled her husband and daughters and set out to make a new life for herself. Now a recovering alcoholic, she returns to Georgia, bringing a new daughter with her, hoping to come to terms with the family she left behind. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.
| | Size | | Length: | 434 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in. | | Width: | 6.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.5 in. | | Weight: | 25.6 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | When Delia Byrd packs her car and begins the long trip home from Los Angeles-from the glamour of the rock 'n roll business, her passion for singing and songwriting, and the darker days of whisky and violence and too much belief in the promises of a man she loved-she heads to Cairo, Georgia, and her own unresolved past. Ten years earlier, Delia left the husband who turned on her, abandoned her two daughters, one an infant, and fled to California. But Delia is pulled back to Georgia: to a world of convenience stores and biscuit factories, kudzu and deep-rooted Baptism-to make a deal with the man she paid a high price to leave. She brings her third daughter, Cissy, with her. And as the lives of Delia, Cissy, Amanda, and Dede converge, Delia's past uncoils into the present with a ferocity that brings all four women to terms with themselves and with one another. Told in the incantatory and unforgettable voice of one of America's greatest storytellers, Cavedweller is a sweeping novel of the human spirit that maps a world of "lost" and "known" caves, the unexplored recesses of the heart, and the lives of four women at a place where violence, and what redeems it, intersect. • Bastard Out of Carolina was a National Book Award Finalist and a national bestseller. • The critically acclaimed film adaptation of Bastard Out of Carolina, directed by Angelica Houston, was broadcast on Showtime in 1996 and is now available on videocassette. • Cavedweller is the long-awaited, greatly anticipated second novel from a beloved author with a strong and loyal audience. • The Plume edition of Bastard Out of Carolina averages 6,000 copies in sales each month.
When Delia Byrd packs up her old Datsun and her daughter Cissy and gets on the Santa Monica Freeway heading south and east, she is leaving everything she has known for ten years: the tinsel glitter of the rock 'n' roll business; her passion for singing and songwriting; and a life lived on credit cards and whiskey with a man who made big promises he couldn't keep. Delia Byrd is headed back to Cayro, Georgia, and for the first time in years, she knows what she wants - the two daughters she left behind a lifetime ago. Cayro, Georgia, is a world of truck farms and convenience stores, biscuit franchises and deep rooted Baptism. And, beneath this surface, caves: lost caves, known caves; caves called "Little Mouth" and "Paula's Lost"; caves where color explodes in the dark and where people have died and been buried; caves waiting to be mapped and explored. Cayro, with its red earth and kudzu, is the only terrain Clint Windsor, the man Delia ran from, and the two girls, Amanda and Dede, have ever known. And when Delia and Cissy reach Cayro, the past unfurls into the present, and Cayro, Georgia, becomes a more complicated place than any of them could have imagined.
| | Industry reviews | "[T]his novel simply isn't as taut and as sharply focused as its predecessor. Allison assigns all these characters, and minor ones as well, a bit too much to do....But given the tale's extraordinary vitality and wisdom, that's a small price to pay."
Salon - Dan Cryer (03/09/1998)
"Here is an appealing amalgam, a Victorian novel of the late-20th-century South. The old-fashioned attributes of...'Cavedweller' include a rambling narrative, a sharp moral sensibility, attractive heroes and villains who have a chance to repent....Some passages...might have been written by George Eliot, had she ever passed through the sound waves of rock-and-roll."
New York Times Book Review - Valerie Sayers (03/15/1998)
"Allison takes a huge chance here, because for all her storytelling power, humor and insight, she is tracking the most common stuff of life, and, as in life, most of her characters are not particularly fascinating upon first meeting....This isn't a 'perfect book,' the words so many used to describe 'Bastard' six years ago....But such talk is always irritating. If a book were perfect why would any writer risk another?"
Nation - JoAnn Wypijewski (03/30/1998)
"Alison's breakaway intensity and warm identification with her characters carry thin long book triumphantly over its repetitions and overemphases, producing an altogether wonderful second novel and, for its author, a giant step forward."
Greenya
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