The Harvard Bride A Mountain Brook Novel
A social satire and a richly nuanced love story of Southern newlyweds who settle in privileged Mountain Brook.
As a newlywed Caroline struggles to find her bearings—unwilling to join the Junior League, look for a first house, contemplate motherhood, or even finish her thank-you notes. Even worse, she can't manage to fulfill her calling as a writer or accomplish anything else worthy of her Harvard degree. Meanwhile Daniel's career as a first-year associate at a powerful law firm is going so well she hardly sees him. The most exciting aspect of the new bride's life is her handsome next-door neighbor, a writer himself and seemingly a kindred spirit. The reappearance of an old school friend—a Southern belle bombshell in hot pursuit of all eligible bachelors and potential real estate clients—only adds to Caroline's problems. In her desperation to forge an identity wholly her own, Caroline accepts an unexpected job offer from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, forty-five minutes away from home. But just when she thinks she has succeeded in putting her personal and professional life together, her fragile new existence falls inexplicably apart.
Also featuring the return of larger-than-life Brook-Haven headmaster Norman Laney, The Harvard Bride
is at once a social satire and a richly nuanced love story. Caroline's
journey of self-discovery takes readers from the jeweled heart of
Mountain Brook and Bama's sorority row, into James Agee's Hale
County—from the inner sanctums of Southern belles into the Deep South
rural farmland, where slaves and sharecroppers once toiled. In the South
the past often contains the keys to understanding the present and
inspiring a better future. As Caroline travels into the heart of the
Alabama darkness from which she came, she suddenly comes face to face
with what she needs to build a life on her own terms in her native land,
if she can summon the courage to make a difficult choice and take a
huge risk._______________________________________________________
holds an A.B. degree in English from Harvard and a Ph.D. in English from Emory. She is the coauthor of the oral biographies Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story, with Onnie Lee Logan, and Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet, with Eugene Walter, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. The Harvard Bride, the third in her series of Mountain Brook novels featuring Norman Laney and his students, is preceded by The Headmaster's Darlings and All the Governor's Men and will be followed by The Ex-suicide,
forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press's Story River
Books, as is her oral biography of Pat Conroy. Clark lives on the Gulf
Coast.