On a summer day in 1946 Sally Werner, the precocious young daughter of hardscrabble Pennsylvania farmers, secretly accepts her cousin's invitation to ride his new motorcycle. Like so much of what follows in Sally's life, it's an impulsive decision with dramatic and far-reaching consequences. Soon she abandons her home to begin a daring journey of self-creation, the truth of which she entrusts only with her granddaughter and namesake, six decades later. But when young Sally's father—a man she has never known—enters her life and offers another story altogether, she must uncover the truth of her grandmother's secret history. More info...
Review by Leah Hager Cohen, The New York Times Book Review, 19 Apr. 2009
Character and the motion of thought; the effects of varied narrative form; contradictory perceptions of time and place; the idiosyncracies of voice; mystery and the impact of disclosure; beauty and ugliness; comedy, temptation, collapse, and recovery; the elusive potential of imagination—these are some of the subjects that Joanna Scott explores in her novels and stories. Modern and contemporary authors she has written about include Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Maureen Howard, William Gass, and J.M. Coetzee.
Courses in fiction writing, modern and contemporary literature
