Iron Shoes »

Molly Giles teaches creative writing at the University of Arkansas. She has won several short fiction awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Boston Globe Award, and the Small Press Best Fiction Award.

Kay Sorenson is stuck. She is forty years old and still trying — and failing — to please her glamorous, willful, and indifferent parents. She abandoned a promising music career, settled into a loveless marriage, became a careless mother, and began to drink, smoke, and daydream too much. But when her mother dies, Kay is left without her lifelong crutch and is finally forced to take her first tentative steps toward becoming the woman she wants to be.

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

This "intense," "well-written, humorous, and touching" debut novel by an award-winning short-story writer tells the "depressing" story of one woman's painful search for identity and meaning in the wake of her family's disintegration.