Cavedweller » (Reprint)

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, Georgia, 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.

Newsweek

Rich and involving.

Cavedweller is Dorothy Allison's second novel, a most praiseworthy sophomore effort from the author of the critically acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina. Allison returns to the rural South that she knows so well, in a sweeping novel of the human spirit. Cavedweller explores the lengths to which the human heart will go for the good of others; it tells the story of four women -- a mother and her three daughters -- who have reached a place where violence and what redeems it intersect.

Cavedweller begins with Delia Byrd climbing into her Datsun and returning to Cayro, Georgia, the city she fled a decade before. She had left Cayro to escape a violent, whiskey-dependent man who loved her passionately and beat her mercilessly. She had left behind two daughters and everything she had ever known for the bright lights and rock-'n'-roll life of Los Angeles, where she went to become a songwriter. Now, after ten years of drugs and hotels and alcohol and credit-card bills, Delia realizes she has made a terrible mistake. Sobering up, she grabs her young third daughter, ten-year-old Cissy, and sets off across the country to find her eldest children in Cayro: a world of Baptists, the Holy Redeemer congregation, a network of colorful and intricate caves interwoven with community history and secrets, and a family that despises Delia for what she did and who she has become.