Barbara Sutton's quirky debut collection tracks the emotional journeys of characters struggling to find harmonious relationships with the people they are expected to love and be loved by. All too often, for Sutton's characters, such supposedly sacred relationships disappoint. In the end, it is t the loved ones who are loved, but the strangers met through chance encounters--the interim mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives. Such unlikely friendships weave their way through Sutton's stories and create sometimes funny and sometimes tragic reflections on the accidental and often fleeting nature of love.Through Sutton's vibrant voices we meet a memorable and varied cast of characters, all suffering the same fate. From the adolescent Marta, who finds a substitute for her absent mother and father in her grandmother's improbable and eccentric relationship with the parish priest, to the emotionally unstable, unemployed Virginia Woolf scholar who finds kinship with a belligerent, equally unstable, nine-year-old boy, Sutton delivers authentic scenes of severe isolation coupled with brief moments of resplendent harmony. It is these transitory moments, these glimpses into the elusive world of light, that manage to sustain our hope.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
University of Georgia Press
GTIN
9780820334219
ISBN-10
0820334219
ISBN-13
9780820334219
eBay Product ID (ePID)
95459233
Product Key Features
Author
Barbara Sutton
Format
Paperback
Language
English
Topic
Short Stories & Fiction Anthologies
Publication Year
2009
Type
Short Stories
Genre
Short Stories & Fiction Anthologies
Dimensions
Height
216mm
Width
140mm
Additional Product Features
Place of Publication
Georgia
Author Biography
Barbara Sutton's stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, Antioch Review, Agni, and other literary journals.