Standalone Novels In Publication Order
- Ellen Foster (1987)
- A Virtuous Woman (1989)
- A Cure for Dreams (1991)
- Charms for the Easy Life (1993)
- Sights Unseen (1995)
- On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (1998)
- Divining Women (2004)
- The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster (2005)
- The Lunatics Ball (2011)
Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order
- How I became a writer (1988)
- Frost and Flower (1995)
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Non-Fiction Book Covers
Kaye Gibbons Books Overview
Ellen Foster
General FictionLarge Print Edition A New York Times Bestseller An Oprahs Book Club title A Hallmark Hall of Fame movieThe life in it, the honesty of thought and eye and feeling and word! Eudora WeltyIn Kaye Gibbons first novel, eleven year old Ellen Foster tells her own story with honesty and unself conscious heroism. After her mother dies, Ellen stays with her father until it becomes too dangerous. Then she lives with a teacher, then an aunt. Ellen takes things as they come, and judges the world and people around her shrewdly. Her lack of self pity, her determination and her gratitude to those who help her make Ellen Foster a memorable hero*ine who takes her place in the hearts of readers everywhere.
A Virtuous Woman
When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn’t fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life. Kaye Gibbons’s first novel, Ellen Foster, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the praise of writers from Walker Percy to Eudora Welty. In A Virtuous Woman, Gibbons transcends her early promise, creating a multilayered and indelibly convincing portrait of two seemingly ill matched people who somehow miraculously make a marriage.
A Cure for Dreams
A story that traces the bonds between four generations of resourceful Southern women through stories passed from one generation to another.
Charms for the Easy Life
A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts. Sophia, Margaret, and Charlie Kate find strength in a time when women almost always depended on men, and their bond deepens as each one experiences love and loss during World War II. Charms for the Easy Life is a passionate, luminous, and exhilarating story about embracing what life has to offer…
even if it means finding it in unconventional ways. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
Sights Unseen
The bestselling author of Charms for the Easy Life reads ‘her best novel since Ellen Foster.’ Kaye Gibbons’ award winning novels of Southern family life have won rave reviews coast to coast. Now, she tells the ‘story of family dislocation and crisis in restrained prose of unflinching clarity, with a honing eye for the small domestic details that conjure a time, place and emotional atmosphere.’ Publishers Weekly To the people of Bend of the River Road, Maggie Barnes is ‘the Barnes woman with all the problems.’ To her family, she is the unpredictable wife, elusive mother, and adored daughter in law, and to her maid, Pearl, she is the mistress who must be cared for like a child. Between the suicidal lows and delirious highs, young Hattie Barnes struggles to find a place in her mother’s heart. She observes her mother’s vain attempts at normalcy, and then watches as she is driven off to the hospital psychiatric ward. Only later will Hattie discover the deep seated hopes and fears of the woman she loves unconditionally, and her inevitable connection to her family’s past. In heartfelt and potent prose, through Hattie’s hushed voice, Sights Unseen tells the story of a troubled relationship and the courage it takes to see it through.
On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
Like America in the mid nineteenth century, Emma Garnet Tate is a woman at war with herself. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grows up increasingly aware that her family’s prosperity is inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. As she tells her story in 1900, she is still prey to her childhood, to the memories of a life that was made bearable in the main by the indomitable family servant Clarice. She secedes from the control of her overbearing father to marry Quincy Lowell, a member of the distinguished Boston family. Living in Raleigh on the eve of the Civil War, Emma Garnet and Quincy, with Clarice’s constant help, create the ideal happy home. When war destroys the rhythm of their days, Emma Garnet works alongside Quincy, an accomplished surgeon. As she assists him in the treatment of wounded soldiers, she comes to see the war as a ‘conflict perpetrated by rich men and fought by poor boys against hungry women and babies.’ After Appomattox, Emma Garnet sets out to take the exhausted Quincy home to Boston, where she begins the journey of her own reconstruction. As in her five previous novels, Kaye Gibbons demonstrates her subtle mastery of detail and her unmistakable voice. Told in graceful cadences, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoonis a shimmering meditation on the divisions of the human heart.
Divining Women
A New York Times BestsellerIn her darkest yet most redeeming novel, Kaye Gibbons scorches us with a firestorm of despair then resurrects love and hope from its very ashes. Autumn, 1918: Rumors of peace are spreading across America, but spreading even faster are the first cases of Spanish influenza. Maureen Ross, well past a safe childbearing age, is experiencing a difficult pregnancy. Her husband, Troop cold and careless of her condition is an emotional cripple who has battered her spirit throughout their marriage. As Maureen’s time grows near, she becomes convinced she will die in childbirth. Into this loveless menage comes Mary Oliver, Troop’s niece. The sheltered daughter of a well to do freethinking family, she arrives to help in Maureen’s last weeks of confinement. Horrified by Troop’s bullying, she realizes that her true duty is to protect her aunt. Kaye Gibbons lives in Raleigh, North Carolina Gibbons’ novel Ellen Foster was chosen as one of Oprah’s Book Club Selections and adapted into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie Gibbons has been influenced by early 20th century African American poets, and writes in an idiomatic Southern dialect Her writing shows an intimate knowledge of the burdens of Southern women and the strength they possess that helps them to overcome the difficulties in their lives
The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster
This sequel to Gibbons’s beloved classic Ellen Foster stands on its own as an unforgettable portrait of a redoubtable adolescent making herself up out of whole cloth. Now fifteen, Ellen is settled into a permanent home with a new mother. Strengthened by adversity and blessed with enough intelligence to design a salvation for herself, she still feels ill at ease in the world. Her sole surviving ritual a visit to the county fair takes on totemic importance. While she holds fast to the shreds of her childhood humoring her best friend, Stuart, who is determined to marry her; and protecting her old neighbor, slow witted Starletta she negotiates her way into a larger world by selling her poetry to pay her way to a camp for gifted students. With a singular mix of perspicacity, na vet , and compassion, Ellen draws us into her life and makes us fall in love with her all over again. Anyone considering making an underage change in life, such as who you’re going to live with, should know there’s no way toavoid the government getting in on the decision, so try to bekind to the lady they’ll send with a stack of tests. Try to stay calm and do your best on them. from The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster 20060106
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