Nora, Nora: A Novel - Couverture rigide

I set this story back in my own dreaming, small-town South, in my own time, 1961: that suspended time swung between two epochs that shaped America for good and all. I think I chose it because that turbulent transition was the greatest epiphany of my life, a crossing from the sweet, insular world I knew to another one, volatile and frightening and yet entirely necessary and right. --Anne Rivers Siddons

Peyton is not ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone a barely remembered cousin who just rolled into town, a cousin who smokes cigarettes and drives a pink Thunderbird. However, her father seems to like Nora well enough, and she does make for good conversation at the Losers Club, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which raises Nora slightly in Peyton's esteem. Maybe she isn't so bad -- maybe Nora is just what quiet Lytton, Georgia, needs this summer.

The whole household is revitalized by Nora's energy, and when she takes a job teaching the first integrated honors class at the local high school, it looks as if she might stay on forever. But soon it becomes clear that something is troubling Nora deeply. Peyton believes that whatever it is, it must be more than the snide comments made by neighbors who don't like her "unsouthern" ways. Nora always laughs that off. It has to be something from her past that's bothering her, something she is running away from. When the shocking truth comes to light, it stuns the residents of their small segregated town. It also teaches Peyton the enormous cost of loving -- and the necessity of doing it anyway.

“A treat to be savored.”

— Houston Chronicle

A classic from New York Times bestselling author Anne Rivers Siddons, Nora, Nora tells the story of free-thinking Cousin Nora Findlay who turns tiny Lytton , Georgia , on its ear in the summer of 1961. Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides) says the author of Low Country, Up Island , Peachtree Street , and King’s Oak “ranks among the best of us,” and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution praises Nora, Nora as “Anne Rivers Siddons writing at the top of her form. This lively, sparkling coming-of-age novel is superbly written and wholly engaging.”