Lost innocence. Betrayal. Smalltown secrets.It all adds up to necessary lies. It always starts with the loss of innocence.Life had plenty to offer beautiful seventeen-year-old Cliffie Flowers in 1953 backwoods Georgia before she got pregnant by a l...
“Janice Daugharty is a natural-born writer.” " Pat Conroy She held him prisoner. He set her free. A moonshiner’s downtrodden wife. A federal agent in search of illegal stills. A love neither expected. A situation about to explode. When ...
At forty, Chanell Foster is proud and popular in her hometown. Her beauty shop is more than her business--it is the town's social hub--and one's status in Cornervill is ensured by a standing weekly appointment in Chanell's book. But life in a small s...
From a new literary star and acclaimed author of Pawpaw Patch, Necessary Lies and Dark of the Moon comes the haunting and poignant novel of a family in crisis, set in the backwoods of Georgia.Meet the Scurvy family, an impoverished clan who are the s...
It is 1956, and thirteeen-year-old Sister must raise her three siblings on her own, as her mother, Marnie, has a new boyfriend who isn't interested in kids. Taking charge of her life, Sister befriends a kindly neighbor named Willa, who ap...
Massacre at Moniac Crossing" is fiction based on fact. In 1904, at a turpentine camp, in North Florida, the residents at the sleepy crossing boarded a train to St. Augustine for a day picnic and sight-seeing trip. By day's end, when everybody boarded...
Ten year old Doodle is in charge of his little brother and baby sister for the summer while his mother, Nina, is awaiting the arrival of her fourth baby. Nina claims that her husband's bossman's wife gave her a Mercedes, which Noodle knows will eithe...
Ah, end of summer, one more week till school starts, and Ruth and her friend Mandy are wading downriver near Ruth's grandfather's cattle and hay farm. Always fun! That is until they spy a newly built house along an upper bank and decide to explore it...
A good-hearted boy. A segregated town. A stolen fortune. A coming-of-age story full of hope and forgiveness. When twelve-year-old Knot Crews, an African American boy growing up in the segregated south Georgia town of Statenville, discovers a bag o...
Some families go on vacation every year, but the Crandells head out to Jackson Prison Georgia. For thirty years they've been hoping to witness the execution of the man responsible for the murders of thier other family members. Based on the true story...
Jilly's young days outside the diner are anger, heat, boredom and filth. Waiting with her are two foul-mouthed, angry Mexican teens and her younger brother, Stinker, whose nickname stuck for a reason. Burning up in the sun from the bay on the Gulf...
Lonliness and rejection switch Beebee from a cry-baby to a cold-hearted killer. His mother and father divorced and gradually went from fighting over who would get to keep Beebee to fighting over who would have to keep Beebee. On his thirteenth birthd...
"Husband and wife, they looked blood-related; they looked perfect, like arm-linking dolls on the top tier of a wedding cake. Except when they were drunk."Drunk was how Associate Professor Randolph Sears--Randy to his only two friends--saw them that e...
Known only as "Sister," this young girl watches her wicked step-father sack up her cats to toss in the river, which for a fact, as she says, "Isn't the worst thing William B. Blaine ever did." Her mother always defends her husband, regardless, and Si...
Young Jim and Sissy are starving, so their mother sends them 20 miles by train to the country home of their father's mother to feed them for the summer. Their father, the community drunk, who lives with his mother and the rest of the put-out, pious f...
Orlando and the Colonel meet death on the same eerily windy March day at the hands of the same killer. Different places, different circumstances. The two South Georgia women have met each other before but only casually, briefly, the meeting of no con...
REVISED: Like Fried Green Tomatoes, this short novel explores a town's misjudgment of two spirited young women, one an insider and the other an outsider. Following 9-11, 2001, and the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the resident...
First published in The Georgia ReviewRevenge isn't sweet for tenant farmer Dump Watson when finally he faces off with his long-time enemy Boss Pender across the Alapaha River. Fishing, Dump, now retired, recalls all the torment and insults from his b...
In the tradition of Eudora Welty, "Beck and Barn" is an old-timey love story about a couple's exaggerated and ironic devotion to each other. After Barney dies, Becky takes a short trip to her sister's in Florida; she returns to find that her no-accou...
Because of his dignified bearing and good looks, Wilton Norton has always been viewed as a ladies' man, though "he has loved only one lady." Now he has passed from that thrilling life-stage. His wife Ann has died and he is alone and growing soft on h...
Minor, a worn-out foxhunter, has been ordered by "the daughter-in-law" to have his old foxhound put down. But he has different ideas--instead he takes Joe-blow on one last hunt in the woods where they've both known their best days. In the changing pi...
Bethann, a struggling college student, takes her evil younger sister, Holly, to re-raise after the grandmother who tried to raise them dies. On the rainy interstate, en route from South Georgia to Miami, Florida, Bethann lays down the rules to Holly-...
Imagine, like the grandfather in this story, being confined to a wheel chair from which you watch your only grandchild--in this case a boy, "Butch"--repeat your past mistakes, like a re-wound video. Already emotionally estranged from the child, who i...
"There is a lot of red claw and long nights in every line Janice Daugharty writes." Pat ConroyDuncan finds his lost faith while hiking to various country churches with his young nephew, who he passes off as the world's littlest preacher. Duncan used ...
Little beauty-queen, Temple, has a loose tooth, and her mother Cammie's greatest fear is that it will drop out tonight during their latest beauty pageant. They are at the only beauty shop in Cammie's hometown, owned by hair dresser Chanell, one of Ca...
First published in STORY journal: Sunny always takes care of her older brother, who is both mentally and physically retarded. He never stops crying, sounds like he is yawning. Her grandmother says she needs a normal childhood--laughter's what's norma...
First published in Ontario Review; edited by Joyce Carol OatesDuring a rare spring snowstorm in South Georgia, a rural mail carrier by the name of Tammy bumps heads with her nightmares when she gives a ride to a stranger cabin-bound by the snow. And ...
Trish is the community dopehead and bad mother. She has already given her two little girls to her x-inlaws and is about to try palming off her little boy to Faye and Ferman too. Smoking her last cigarette, she points out the cigarette burns and bruis...
No longer a Paul-Newman type playboy, who used to leave his family waiting and wondering, Elec now prides himself on "making trades" at the various houses located along the rural roads where he works. For instance, at the home of June Bug and Candy, ...
An ancient black lady reaches out from the grave with a message scratched out on a one-dollar bill for her grown daughters and grandchildren. Going through the old lady's belongings, following her funeral, Fannie, boss of her sisters and the whole fa...
In time, Willie will drop from his high on alcohol and self-pity. In time, he will adapt to working for the black man who used to work for him. Bear now owns Willie's hard-earned heavy-construction business because of a glitch in government regulatio...
(Companion story to "Jesus Bus")Dot Knight's car is brand-new in this story and she aims to keep it that way. Problem is, she has been enlisted by her adored preacher to drive those nasty Odums' kids to Vacation Bible School half...
Everything Adam has learned about hard work and clean living, as well as crime and punishment, is tested when he gets to know one of the juvenile delinquents traveling cross-country with a wagon train. Vision Quest is the title of a state-sponsored p...
It was all over the news, several years ago, the story of a woman named Susan Smith driving her car into a SC lake and drowning her two children. Spellbound by the news, another young mother named Ginger, in South Georgia, imagines how Susan Smith r...
Outside, it is raining, freezing. But inside Lavonia is doing fine. She is seated on the front row at her x-husband's funeral, facing him in the coffin and his legal wife Betty above in the choir. Through some mixup in her x's obituary, Lavonia has b...
Suppose that you have left your hometown for a decade and during that time recieved so many shock treatments that your memory is shot. When you return home, while you are gradually recovering, you keep having sensations and moments of recognition as ...
Hun is ninety-some-odd years old and at the mercy of a bitter, controlling black woman hired by the family to keep their beloved relative at home till she dies. When Hun's two grand-nieces show up one fall morning for a visit, the caregiver c...
Gransallie's favorite sermon to her granddaughters was on the merits of making something out of themselves like her favorite neice, a school teacher, Ophelia. And then following a backwoods family reunion, Gransallie learns that Ophelia and her fianc...
Only Earl Sanders, a black man from Washington, DC, is worthy to speak at the library dedication in his South Georgia home county. Only he has gone away to Harvard and become an attorney. After nobody, white or black, offers to put him up for the nig...
From "Lovie's Baby":"They said they saw Lovie that Monday morning running up the road toward the courthouse, with that pink blanket all nussed-up to her bosom like the baby was still alive. And it SOME cold..."...
The Count and his grown son Lucky, on one of their Saturday morning drunks, stumble into a black woman's kitchen and begin pilfering for food. When she happens up on them, the Count stabs her with his pocket knife. They go to jail but not for long be...
""Ness and Codaddy" is a children's rhyming book about two chocolate labs, daddy and daughter. Ness, the one year old female, is fascinated with her daddy's pink tongue. Codaddy always gets blamed by his master for Ness's mischief, s"...
Ness and Codaddy is a children's rhyming book about two chocolate labs, daddy and daughter. Ness, the one year old female, is fascinated with her daddy's pink tongue. Codaddy always gets blamed by his master for Ness's mischief, so he lures her away ...
Lige's sister has married his hunting and fishing buddy and messed up everything, in the ten- year-old's confused mind. But when the buddies go fishing on the Alapaha River the next day and rob a honey tree, all is forgiven because of Lige's capacity...
Obese, long-time school secretary Alene finally gets her first truck and her first boy friend--a hitch-hiker who she gives a ride that ends up in her bedroom, in the house she shares with her saintly, finiky mother. Then the school principal replaces...
General Norton, near the end of his days, is visited on a Sunday afternoon by a supposed thief, and he is in for the time of his life. Loneliness and isolation drive the General to advertise a goat on a radio exchange program, which "the Hippie" pick...
""Grannie has bad skin cancers but not bad enough to take her out of this world" where nobody wants her except one granddaughter. Luzanne drives her from house to house belonging to Grannie's three daughters, but each refuses to take her. It i"...
Duck and Eileen win the big Easter Florida lottery! On Good Friday, the couple had bought 25 Lotto tickets each out of his and her own personal money. By Saturday evening, count-down to drawing time, Duck could lay hands on only 24 of his and Eileen ...
The little migrant community, of Jennings, Florida is at first tolerant of Dot Knight and her Sunday school class, who have come to invite the laborers to revival at the Baptist church. Dot has to consult her "Guide to Speaking Spanish" to communicat...
A little girl learns from her grandmother about the natural cycles of life and death. They watch the moon waxing and waning; they watch the tomatoes in the garden grow from tiny yellow flowers to red, ripe orbs. The little girl sees herself in com...
Miss Faye is recovering from a broken hip. Sick of the physical therapy session, in which a bunch of old people are tossing a big yellow ball, she wheels her chair from the room, and keeps wheeling it till she is sitting outside the hospital. Not her...
Beth is pregnant again and her son is only seventeen months old. She and her husband Donnie cannot afford to have another baby. Both work, but they can't catch up on debts. Beth will have to get an aborion, which is cheaper than delivery. Still, she ...
The Pulitzer-nominated author of EARL IN THE YELLOW SHIRT turns her acclaimed talents to an epic story of three generations of Southern women at Big Eddy, the home place they love. HEIR TO THE EVERLASTING begins at the turn of the last century with t...
Sibyl is either dying -- or just dying to cause trouble. Sympathy for a man-hunting siren? Sibyl says she’s dying. But this sexy new neighbor in a small Georgia town, circa 1960, may be lying. After all, her main goal seems to be milking her story ...
Fiction. So it goes in Janice Daugharty's new book, GATOR JACK, an insightful look at an irascible old grandfather with a bum leg and his hypervigilant grandson, Doodle. At nine years old, Doodle is the older brother of two younger siblings, Mikey an...