(An emotionally vibrant story of family secrets and the sacrifices that love compels us to make.

Their friendship is born an early-September day in 1947, in a freshman dorm, when the brassily Yankee and free-spirited Libba Charles first meets her roommate, a near perfect flower of modest young Southern womanhood in the person of Frances Simpson; and for forty-six years it flourishes.

It ends with a promise. On her deathbed Frances extracts it from her three daughters?the utterly capable homemaker Alice; the recalcitrant Allegra, a recovering alcoholic; and bohemian Edie, who shrinks in the face of any commitment: their promise to "look after Libba." As if the formidable, tough-minded Libba Charles, author of ten books, a literary celebrity, needed looking after.

Yet when they are summoned by Libba to Creek Cabin, their mother's summer hideaway in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, they go. None of them is prepared, though, for what they will discover there?about their mother, about Libba, about themselves?in this poignant, adroit rendering of reunions and farewells.

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