Leaving Eden

by Anne LeClaire

Published 27 August 2002
In the small town of Eden, Virginia, 16-year-old Tallie is sweeping up cut hair at the Klip 'N' Kurl, plotting ways to get the attention of the local heart throb, taking care of her daddy, and considering how things might have been different if her mother, Dinah Mae, hadn't died four years before. Focused on the secrets, dreams and love that bind a mother and a daughter even after death, the novel alternates between the summer of 1992, when the Glamour Company comes to Eden, seducing the townswomen with the promise of beauty and transformation, and the summer of 1988 when Dinah Mae is dying, and Tallie must search for the clues to family secrets and a cure that will save her mother. This novel is about the power of love and forgiveness to mend hearts shattered by death and broken dreams. Readers of Anne LeClaire's previous novel, ENTERING NORMAL, will recognise the depth of characterisation and perceptiveness that she brings to all her writing.