Glow

On the eve of World War II, young Ella McGee sits on a bus bound for her Southern hometown. Behind her in Washington, D.C., lie the broken pieces of her parents’ love story—a black father drafted; an activist mother of Scotch-Irish and Cherokee descent confronting racist thugs. But Ella’s journey is just beginning when she reaches Hopewell County, and her disappearance into the Georgia mountains will stir up memories long suppressed. As the secrets of Ella’s family history unfold in a vivid generational saga, Glow transports us to the Blue Ridge frontier of 1836, where slave plantations adjoin the haunted glades of a razed Cherokee Nation. Ron Rash’s Appalachia cascades into Alice Walker’s Georgia red clay in this lushly written debut announcing a major new voice in Southern fiction.