Marina Brown
A member of our Writers4Higher family releases her new novel Lisbeth.
Congratulations, Marina!
Here's what Marina has to share:
Can the quest for revenge remain alive after death?
On Buena Vista, a small
Mississippi property, Claire Elliston finds herself compelled to rebuild the
house her mother inhabited 40 years before. But the past and its evils come
alive as the ruins are disturbed--laying bare the sins of a time when Jim Crow
ruled the South, when depravity took place behind lace curtains, and when
cross-race love could get you killed.
The unexplained arrival
of a German doctor in the small community breaks open the past's layered
secrets as Claire is torn between two allegiances —and perhaps two
personalities. Dotted with colorfully naughty Southern humor, this strange saga
leaps time and place as a black and a white family discover their shared need
for retribution and their capacity for fidelity and love.
There is something about
the South, isn’t there. Something that through its charm, its languid days and
soft nights, the cadence of its drawls which are more like forgotten songs…
that is… let’s be honest, a little scary.
Maybe it’s what used to
happen there in oak groves where dark shadows played against white cloth. Where
manners were the fabric covering naked cruelty. Where the tilt of the head or a
fingertips’ graze could have somebody readying a rope. Yes, the possibility of
something scary was always there.
At least that’s how I’d
perceived the South. And I think much of that mystery, the unsettling part you
sense when you pass cotton fields rimmed by rows of abandoned cabins or an
unpainted building with a listing steeple….is still there. But there’s so much
more.
In my stays in
Mississippi I met women, lots of them, young, old, middle-life women who were
hilariously funny, intensely generous, and utterly sincere. I heard their
worries and their fears and the ways in which they supported one another— doing
it within some sisterhood of the South they may be unknowable to the
Northern-born. They did it with gentility and class, no matter their strata,
and perhaps no matter how they really felt. These were Southern women who knew
how to keep on ‘keepin’ on.’
Even though my last
book, Land Without Mirrors, takes
place on a mysterious Caribbean island, a land of lepers, the Mississippi of Lisbeth is no less exotic. And that is
how I’ve attempted to chronicle the people and the place, the depravity and the
decorum, the secrets of two generations that have come to life again.
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