Nobody's Girl — Antonya Nelson

It's been nineteen months since thirty-year-old Birdy Stone came to Pinetop. Birdy spends her days trying to teach her students to appreciate the beauty of literature and her nights getting high with Jesus, her gay colleague and confidant. Birdy regards Pinetop as merely an escapade. But the desultory quality of her life is interrupted when a middle-aged widow asks Birdy to edit her rambling memoir. Combining superb storytelling with good humor, Antonya Nelson follows Birdy as she helps Mrs. Anthony reconstruct the history surrounding the bizarre and mysterious deaths of Mrs. Anthony's husband and daughter years earlier. As Birdy is drawn deeper into her subject's story, she begins a love affair with Mrs. Anthony's surviving son - a young man who just happens to be one of Birdy's students. With its sensuous and lovingly rendered Southwestern setting, Nobody's Girl is a startling novel that showcases the striking talents of an emminently gifted writer.