Big Stone Gap

About this book

Its 1978 and Ave Maria Mulligan is the thirty-five-year-old self-proclaimed spinster of Big Stone Gap a sleepy hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Shes also the local pharmacist the co-captain of the Rescue Squad and the director of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine the towns long-running Outdoor Drama. Ave Maria is content with her life of doing errands and negotiating small details-until she discovers a skeleton in her familys formerly tidy closet that completely unravels her quiet conventional life. Suddenly she finds herself juggling two marriage proposals conducting a no-holds-barred family feud planning a life-changing journey to the Old Country and helping her best friend the high-school band director design a halftime show to dazzle Elizabeth Taylor the violet-eyed Hollywood movie star whos coming through town on a campaign stump with her husband senatorial candidate John Warner. Filled with big-time eccentrics and small-town shenanigans Big Stone Gap is a jewel box of original characters including sexpot Bookmobile librarian Iva Lou Wade; Fleeta Mullins the chain-smoking pharmacy cashier with a penchant for professional wrestling; the dashing visionary Theodore Tipton; Elmo Gaspar the snake-handling preacher; Jack MacChesney a coal-mining bachelor looking for true love; and Pearl Grimes a shy mountain girl on the verge of a miraculous transformation. Comic and compassionate Big Stone Gap is is the story of a woman who thinks life has passed her by only to learn that the best is yet to come.