Salt

Book excerpt: Anna Stockton was a bright, imaginative child exulting in a rare freedom in the mountains of North Carolina who grew into a young woman possessed of romantic yearnings and a great love of books. Hungering to make a new kind of life for herself, she marries John Bayley, a man twice widowed, and begins a family amid a difficult and fiery union. Set in the fictional hamlet of Faith, North Carolina, Salt weaves together the lives of Anna's family and friends in a remarkably moving novel of exultation and despair, of grief and ghosts.