The Floatplane Notebooks

by Clyde Edgerton

Published 9 September 1988

The Copeland family of Listre, North Carolina, goes back a long way. Meredith Copeland's father, Albert, keeps a sort of written family record in some notebooks he bought to log the flights of his home-built floatplane, a project Albert first undertook in 1956, when his children were just kids. Now that the kids are grown -- Thatcher has a son of his own, Meredith and Mark are back from Vietnam, and Noralee is off dating hippies -- the notebooks are thick with the floatplane's failures to lift off and bulging with color Polaroids of the wisteria blossoms near the family plot, favorite family dogs, Thatcher and Bliss's wedding, records of Noralee's height and weight, a diagram of the graveyard, a newspaper story about wild-child Meredith's many backfired schemes. This novel travels back in time more than one hundred years, to the Copeland bride who first planted the wisteria by the back porch that would take over the surrounding woods, and then down to the present again to show how even though times change, people are pretty much the same.


Raney

by Clyde Edgerton

Published 2 January 1985
"This book is too good to keep to yourself. Read it aloud with someone you love, then send it to a friend. But be sure to keep a copy for yourself, because you'll want to read it again and again."
Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Raney is a small-town Baptist. Charles is a liberal from Atlanta. And RANEY is the story of their marriage. Charming, wise, funny, and truthful, it is a novel for everyone to love.
"A real jewel."
RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH