Shelter Book Cover

Shelter


A General Fiction Novel


Subgenres:

  • Coming-of-Age,
  • Appalachia,
  • Family Drama
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This book is for you if you're into...

  • Coming-of-age stories set in wild Appalachian landscapes
  • Kids at summer camp facing darkness beyond adult understanding
  • Family secrets unraveling against a backdrop of 1960s rural America
Publisher Description

In a West Virginia girls camp in July 1963, a group of children experience an unexpected rite of passage.

Shelter is an astonishing portrayal of an American loss of innocence as witnessed by a drifter named Parson, two young sisters, Lenny and Alma, and a feral boy.

Like Buddy, the wide-eyed boy so at home in the natural bower of the forest, Lenny and Alma are forever transformed by violence, by family secrets, by surprising turns of love.

What they choose to remember, what they meet within and around the boundaries of the camp, will determine the rest of their lives.

In a leafy wilderness undiminished by societal rules and dilemmas, Lenny and Alma confront a terrible darkness and find in themselves a knowledge never lent them by the adult world.

Visceral, filled with suspense and surprise, Shelter is an extraordinary achievement.

Jayne Anne Phillips continues to explore family ties and generational complexities.

She questions the idea of the existence of evil and brings to startling immediacy the primal divinity of the isolated, mountainous landscape of rural Appalachia.

Shelter is a novel of transcendent beauty by one of the finest writers of our time.

More Jayne Anne Phillips

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