Swan - Frances Mayes

The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an Edenic, hidebound small town in Georgia. As Swan opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archeologist in Italy: the body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years earlier, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, Ginger grapples with the profound effects of their mother's life and death upon their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine's death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that want to keep the past buried. Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the Deep South while telling an utterly compelling story about the complexity of family ties, Swan marks the remarkable fiction début of one of the world's best-loved travel writers.