On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon » (Abridged)

Kaye Gibbons shot to literary stardom with the 1987 publication of Ellen Foster, her debut novel in which she introduced the tough, love-starved little girl who earned her legions of fans (Oprah among them). A big fan herself of everything from Diet Coke to rap music, Gibbons continues to enchant readers with The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster.

Kaye Gibbons's sixth novel, her first since the dual selection of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman for Oprah's Book ClubT, is the story of Emma Garnet Tate Lowell, a level-eyed Southern lady who comes of age in the years leading up to the Civil War. On the occasion of her 70th birthday, Emma decides the time has come to make a clean breast of the tumultuous events of her long life. "Having survived my father and the war, I am capable of anything," she observes. Born to privilege on the James River plantation of Seven Oaks, Emma grows up increasingly aware that her family's fortunes are inextricably linked to slavery -- an awareness that begins when she witnesses the senseless murder of a slave by her brutal, dominating father. She flees Seven Oaks to marry surgeon Quincy Lowell, scion of the Boston Lowells, and the couple settles in Raleigh. During the war, she works beside her husband treating wounded Confederate soldiers and gradually comes to see the grand cause as a "conflict perpetrated by rich men and fought by poor boys against hungry women and babies." After Appomattox, Emma Garnet sets out to take the exhausted Quincy home to Boston, where she begins the journey of her own reconstruction.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An occasion for even more accolades.