The Roots of the Olive Tree: A Novel

Description

An extraordinary new voice in contemporary woman's fiction, Courtney Miller Santo makes her magnificent debut with The Roots of the Olive Tree, a novel that will delight fans of Sarah Blake's The Postmistress, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, and the works of Kristin Hannah. Five generations of firstborn Keller women live in the same house on an olive grove in secluded northern California. Matriarch Anna is 112 and trying to be the oldest woman in the world-and succeeding heartily. Her daughter Bets, granddaughter Callie, great-granddaughter Deb, and great-great granddaughter Erin are also defying longevity norms. When a geneticist comes to study the women at the same time Erin announces she is pregnant with a firstborn boy, the Kellers' roots are shaken wide open. Told in the third-person perspective of each of the women, their story-the secrets and lies that divide them and the love that ultimately ties them together-is revealed in compulsive prose and compassionate drive.

Courtney Miller Santo learned to share the stories that come to her from her great-grandmother, who lives in Northern California. She teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis, where she received her MFA. She received a BA in journalism from Washington and Lee University, where she learned the limits of true stories, and although born and raised in Portland, Oregon, she's spent most of her adult life in the South, where she learned that not all stories are about kings and their palaces. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Irreantum, Sunstone, and Segullah.