The Girl from Charnelle

It's 1960 in the Panhandle town of Charnelle, Texas — a year and a half since sixteen-year-old Laura Tate's mother boarded a bus and mysteriously disappeared. Assuming responsibility for the Tate household, Laura cares for her father and three brothers and outwardly maintains a sense of calm. But her balance is upset and the repercussions of her family's struggles are revealed when a chance encounter with a married man leads Laura into a complicated relationship for which she is unprepared. As Kennedy battles Nixon for the White House, Laura must navigate complex emotional terrain and choose whether she, too, will flee Charnelle. Dramatizing the tension between desire and familial responsibility, "The Girl from Charnelle" delivers a heartfelt portrait of a young woman's reckoning with the paradoxes of love. Eloquent, tender, and heart-wrenching, K. L. Cook's unforgettable debut novel marks the arrival of a significant new voice in American fiction.

K. L. Cook won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize for his collection of linked stories, Last Call. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Poets & Writers, Threepenny Review, Shenandoah, Witness, and American Short Fiction. He has won an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship for fiction, the grand prize in the Santa Fe Writers' Project Literary Arts Series, and residency fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Blue Mountain Center. He lives in Arizona and teaches at Prescott College and Spalding University's MFA Program in Writing.