Bridge of Sand
Books / Hardcover
ISBN: 0151015430 / Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2009
Dana, the widow of a senator, sells her home in Pennsylvania and retraces her roots in the South, where she reconnects with Cassius Huston, but after being threatened by Cassius's African-American family, Dana flees to the Gulf Coast where she finally finds herself in a place and culture she never could have anticipated.
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Dana Ullman buries her husband on the morning of 9/11, only miles from the United 93 crash. Her life on hold, her emotions dwarfed by the general angst, she finds herself temporarily paralyzed. Finally, she heads south to try to pick up the lost strands of her youth. Finding her grandmother's home has been replaced by a strip mall, she calls an old acquaintance. Cassius is black, separated from a harridan of a wife, devoted to his three-year-old. Much to their surprise, Cassius and Dana fall deeply in love. When she is threatened by Cassius's family, Dana heads to the Gulf Coast, to the fishing village of Pelican Bay, to wait for him.She is soon drawn intimately into the life of the small town, a town with an invisible dividing line between black and white. Physically and metaphorically, Dana lives in the middle of that line. In the course of the tale, Dana will be obsessed by love, pulled into the local family meltdowns and public secrets, and will provide sanctuary to several unforgettable characters, both black and white.Bridge of Sand is a nuanced portrait of the complicated lives of ordinary Americans, of a unique yet recognizable community, and of a woman who, unsteady in the twin hurricanes of history and place, finally finds solid ground on which to stand.
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