The Ballad of Laurel Springs - Janet Beard - Books - Gallery Books - 9781982151560 - October 19, 2021
In case cover and title do not match, the title is correct

The Ballad of Laurel Springs


Get an email once the item is available
Do you have a profile? Log in
Get notified about new Janet Beard releases
Add to your iMusic wish list

Not rated yet

From the internationally bestselling author of The Atomic City Girls, a provocative novel set in eastern Tennessee that "explores the legacies--of passion and violence, music and faith--that haunt one family across the generations" (Jillian Medoff, author of This Could Hurt).

Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialized in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation--to be careful of men and desire--are not just Grace's to learn. Her family's tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of women are affected by the violence immortalized in folksongs like "Knoxville Girl" and "Pretty Polly" reminding them always to know their place--or risk the wages of sin.

Janet Beard's stirring novel, informed by her love of these haunting ballads, vividly imagines these women, defined by the secrets they keep, the surprises they uncover, and the lurking sense of menace that follows them throughout their lives even as they try to make a safe place in the world for themselves. "This inspired story of Appalachian folklore" (Publishers Weekly) will move and rouse you.


288 pages

Media Books     Hardcover Book   (Book with hard spine and cover)
Released October 19, 2021
ISBN13 9781982151560
Publishers Gallery Books
Pages 288
Dimensions 152 × 229 × 25 mm   ·   465 g
Language English  

More from the same publisher