Dorothy Allison exploded onto the literary scene in 1992 with Bastard Out of Carolina, her stunning semiautobiographical story of violence and incest in a rural Southern family. In Cavedweller, Allison returns with a powerful story of indomitable women in hardscrabble situations, proving herself an expert mapper of the human heart. Delia Byrd, a former alcoholic rock-'n'-roll singer, is tortured by memories of the two daughters she abandoned ten years earlier when she fled her abusive husband. When her lover, rock star Randall Pritchard, is killed in a motorcycle accident, Delia decides to leave Los Angeles and return to Cayro, Ga., to reclaim her children. Taking along Cissy, her daughter by Randall, Delia drives across the country nonstop, not knowing how to win her daughters back, knowing only that the odds are against her.
Dorothy gives an overview of the book:
Dorothy Allison exploded onto the literary scene in 1992 with Bastard Out of Carolina, her stunning semiautobiographical story of violence and incest in a rural Southern family. In Cavedweller, Allison returns with a powerful story of indomitable women in hardscrabble situations, proving herself an expert mapper of the human heart. Delia Byrd, a former alcoholic rock-'n'-roll singer, is tortured by memories of the two daughters she abandoned ten years earlier when she fled her abusive husband. When her lover, rock star Randall Pritchard, is killed in a motorcycle accident, Delia decides to leave Los Angeles and return to Cayro, Ga., to reclaim her children. Taking along Cissy, her daughter by Randall, Delia drives across the country nonstop, not knowing how to win her daughters back, knowing only that the odds are against her.
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About Dorothy
Dorothy Allison grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who worked as a waitress. Now living in Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, she describes herself as a feminist, a working class...
Published Reviews
Dec.12.2007
Here is an appealing amalgam, a Victorian novel of the late-twentieth-century South. The old-fashioned attributes of Dorothy Allison's second novel, Cavedweller, include a rambling narrative, a...
Dec.12.2007
George Garrett, author and critic who reviewed Bastard Out of Carolina for The New York Times Book Review wanted to “blow a bugle to alert the reading public that a major new talent has...
Note from the author coming soon...