From Publishers Weekly
A native of Lython, Ga., Micah Winship left town at age 18, after a bitter breach with her father caused by her involvement in the civil rights movement. Twenty years later, she is a noted journalist, a mother and divorcee. At a low point in her career, just as her daughter has left to spend the summer in California, Mike hears from her sister DeeDee, who writes asking for help with their dying father. In a particularly vulnerable state, Mike goes home. Brittle and sharp-edged, repelled by DeeDee's transformation into a mountainous caricature of would-be gentility, unmoved by her father's battle to stop the Department of Transportation from building a highway through his parents' farm, the "homeplace" that has never meant much to her, she intends to stay only a few weeks. But she is caught up in a passionate affair with Bayard Sewell, a shining figure in the local political firmament whom she had loved as a girl. On a trip to the farm with her father and the Bible-quoting, rough-edged lawyer who is his only supporter, Mike begins to understand the old man's attachment to the land and reluctantly agrees to join the fight. In the process she finally plumbs the depths of her own anger and falseness, finding resources of compassion and strength. About love and death, greed and passion, the pull of family and the push of self, Homeplace is a deeply moving story of a fierce and necessary forgiveness. Siddons also wrote Heartbreak Hotel and The House Next Door. 35,000 first printing; $35,000 ad/promo; author tour. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Micah Winship is a successful journalist living in New York City, a troubled childhood in small-town Georgia far behind her. Her father's illness, however, brings her back to the home she had fled in fury and disgrace 20 years earlier in the wake of a family storm concerning Micah's growing interest in the Civil Rights Movement. Now, in this hot summer visit, the past encroaches on the present, and Micah is drawn back into the family politics and sexual drama of her adolescence. For all its psychological overtones of guilt, difficult love, and the burden of childhood scars, this novel is basically a romance, complete with white knight. The prose flows easily and creates an evocative atmosphere of summer in the Deep South. Laurie Spector Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright Index Project, Cambridge, Mass.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.



"Siddons is a fine teller of tales."



"Powerful, sensitive...You won't want to miss Homeplace."



"...writes with such astonishing lyrical beauty that you will want to read it aloud to everyone you ever loved."


Book Description
After twenty-one years Micah (Mike) Winship is making the big move--she's going home for a visit. She hasn't been back since 1963, when her father threw her out, but now he is dying and asking for her. And although she is armed with her succesful journalism career and the strength found after her divorce, she is nearing forty and her sophisticated urban lifestyle is falling apart.Heading home, Mike is unprepared for a past that has lain in wait for her--one that includes an old love, a spoiled sister, and a plot to seize her family's land. And in trying to understand her long-forgotten self, she learns at last those lessons best learned early about love and loss, family and forgiveness, and the undeniable need for a place called home.


Download Description
Homeplace is the story of Ana, a stranger on a lonesome Iowa farm, a young woman struggling to raise her late stepdaughter's child in a farmhouse filled with danger. There is Esther, the child's crazed aunt, and dark secrets and memories lurking in every corner. And there is Owen, the child's father, the master of the house--and the man awakening new passions in Ana . . . as well as a daring new dream.

ANNOTATION

In 1963, Micah Winship fled her Georgia home, running from things she did not understand--the things that make a home a home. Twenty years later, her life in New York is falling apart. When her dying father calls her home, she goes--but is she still running?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Micah (Mike) Winship was ordered out of her parents' home twenty years ago. But now her father is dying and asking for her. Tired of her New York life, she heads back down South, and is forced to confront a past that includes an older lover, an overindulged sister, and the surprising and inexplicable pull of a place called home....

FROM THE CRITICS

Pat Conroy

Anne Rivers Siddons...writes with such astonishing lyrical beauty that you will want to read it aloud to everyone you ever loved.

Atlanta Journal & Constitution

Powerful, sensitive...You won't want to miss Homeplace.

Washington Post Book World

Siddons is a fine teller of tales.

Washington Post Book World