Mary Faith Rapple wonders when her lover will stop making promise he can’t keep—and leave his wife at last. But Mary Faith isn’t the only woman in town with man troubles, for everyone has someone they want, someone they can’t have, and someone they want to forget. Sayers has a gift for voice and the honest, gritty commentary about human behavior. This book offers her own version of the humor that Southern writers from Eudora Welty to Flannery O’Connor to Reynolds Price use so tellingly. Sayers’ novel is a skillful and well-crafted book which should appeal to readers of intelligent fiction.

VALERIE SAYERS is the author of five novels: Due East; How I Got Him Back, or, Under the Cold Moon's Shine; Who Do You Love; The Distance Between Us; and Brain Fever. Who Do You Love and Brain Fever were named New York Times "Notable Books of the Year," and a film, Due East, was based on her novels Due East and How I Got Him Back. She has received a Pushcart Prize for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and has served on two NEA literature panels. Her stories, essays, and reviews appear widely in such journals as Zoetrope, Ploughshares, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Commonweal, and have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.

"If William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County was a postage stamp of the South, then Valerie Sayers’ fictional hamlet, Due East., S.C., is a microchip . . . brings to mind novelist Walker Percy and his Kierkegaardian leaps to faith." —New York Daily News— -