Shortly before daybreak in War, West Virginia, a passing train derails and spills an avalanche of coal over sixteen-year-old Emma Palmisano’s house, trapping her sleeping family inside. The year is 1924, and the remote mines of Appalachia have filled with families like Emma’s―poor, immigrant laborers building new lives half a world away from the island of Sicily. Emma awakes in total darkness, to the voice of a railroad man, Caleb Sypher, who is digging her out from the suffocating coal. From his pocket he removes two spotless handkerchiefs and tenderly cleans Emma’s bare feet. Though she knows little else about this railroad man, Emma marries him a week later, and Caleb delivers her from the gritty coal camp to thirty-four acres of pristine Virginia mountain farmland. Winner of the South Carolina First Novel Prize in 2012, In the Garden of Stone is a multi-generational tale about the nature of power and pride, love and loss, and how one impoverished family endures estrangement from their land and each other in order to unearth the rich seams of forgiveness. Emma gives birth to a son, Dean, but the family’s life is shattered by a hobo’s bullet at the railroad station; the boy grows up early, becoming a remote man with fierce and unpredictable loyalties. Dean’s daughter, Hannah, forsakes her heritage and wanders far from home, in the end reconnecting with the Sypher family in the wildest place of all, the human heart. Bleak, harrowing, and beautifully told, In the Garden of Stone, is a haunting saga of endurance and redemption. "This novel is so detailed and exact that I found myself absorbed. Tekulve moved me through the generations, with surprises and sadness and drama. She makes this specialized life come alive--to show people who struggle and survive ... or don't survive."-C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor, The Atlantic "This is a beautifully sculpted novel of fully realized characters whose story will grip you from start to finish."-Thomas E. Kennedy, author of Falling Sideways Susan Tekulve is the author of In the Garden of Stone , winner of the 2012 South Carolina First Novel Prize and a 2014 Gold IPPY Award. She's also published two short story collections: Savage Pilgrims and My Mother's War Stories . Her stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah , The Georgia Review , New Letters , Best New Writing 2007 , The Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly , Puerto del Sol , Prairie Schooner , North Dakota Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Beloit Fiction Journal , Crab Orchard Review , The Literary Review , Web Del Sol , Black Warrior Review , and The Kansas City Star . She has been awarded a Sewanee Writers' Conference Scholarship and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Scholarship. An Associate Professor of English, she teaches in the BFA and MFA in creative writing programs at Converse College. Used Book in Good Condition