Winner of the Chatauqua South Award for Fiction Now in paperback ? Includes a Reader's Guide ?Owens? fine writing and the ring of her natural voice will carry readers along like a tale told on a porch on a sultry Southern night.? ? Publishers Weekly Out of the shotgun houses and deep, shaded porches of a West Florida mill town comes this extraordinary novel of love and redemption. Gabriel Catts recounts his lifelong love for his brother's wife, Myra ? whose own demons threaten to overwhelm all three of them. The story told in My Brother Michael is retold in Myra Sims, Janis Owens? second novel, from Myra's point of view. See page 45.

Jolie Hoyt is a good Southern girl living in Hendrix, a small Florida Panhandle town. All too aware of her family's closet full of secrets and long-held distrust of outsiders, Jolie throws caution to the wind when she meets Sam Lense, a Jewish anthropology student from Miami, who is in town to study the ethnic makeup of the region.
Jolie and Sam fall recklessly in love, but their affair ends abruptly when Sam is discovered to have pried too deeply into Hendrix's dark racial history and he becomes the latest victim in a long tradition of small-town violence. Twelve years later, Jolie and Sam are forced to revisit the unresolved issues of their young love and finally shed light on the ugly history of Jolie's hometown. A complex and compulsively readable Southern saga, "American Ghost "is a richly woven exploration of how the events of our past haunt our present.