Small Town Girls

A beautifully written memoir in vignettes by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips'Towns and cities change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns stay as we left them. Later, they appear, brilliant with sounds and smells, intense, suspended images that slide through time like the slow, saturated frames of a home movie.'Part coming-of-age story, part social history, Small Town Girls vividly evokes the Appalachian landscape of Jayne Anne Phillips' childhood and the ways in which it has informed her novels and, indeed, her life. The stoic matriarchs of Jayne Anne's family - and the powerful myths that they hand from generation to generation - come to life in these pages, moving seamlessly from meditations on mother-daughter relationships to a vibrant retelling of ancient family feuds, from an adoring ode to her dog Sasha to the contemplation of those fated to be writers themselves. Frequently funny, lyrical and heart-rending but never sentimental, Jayne Anne evokes a vanished world that still reverberates through to the present day. Combining the intimate perspective on rural poverty of Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead with the candour of Annie Ernaux, Small Town Girls is a major new work from a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.