Holly: The Romance of a Southern Girl

At eighteen, Holly Wayne stands at the precipice of everything she has ever known. Her father dead, her childhood home sold beneath her feet, she retreats into the only world that makes sense: the moss-hung lanes and honeyed light of Waynewood, where her Aunt India maintains the fragile architecture of gentility. Then Robert Winthrop arrives, the new owner, and suddenly the safe geography of her life fractures into something unnamed and terrifying. Holly has never been kissed, never been truly seen by anyone outside her small circle. Now she must navigate the treacherous waters of desire, class, and the grown-up grief that has followed her father's coffin into the ground. Barbour writes with a poet's attention to the Southern landscape, every azalea and twilight serving as emotional counterpoint to Holly's awakening. This is a novel about the particular loneliness of young women who must become someone new while the world insists they stay exactly as they are. For readers who crave quiet, aching beauty and the slow burn of first love set against decay and possibility.