When her husband dumps her for an old girlfriend and sets all of Peachland, South Carolina, gossiping, Janey Daniels has to get away—far away—for a "sabbatical" year. She flees to Burlington, Vermont, home of Aunt May, her mother's only living relative. There she adopts Beulah, a Labrador puppy in training to become a companion dog for the blind. Not for a moment does Janey suspect that this "year of the dog" will change her life forever.Shelby Hearon is an acknowledged master at illuminating the nuances of relationships. In Year of the Dog, she explores the surprising ways that the heart heals after a betrayal. While Janey is training Beulah, Beulah leads Janey to a new love, James Maarten, a smart, "fidgety" teacher they meet at the dog park. As Janey soon discovers, James has suffered a betrayal of his own that makes it hard for him to open up and trust her with even the smallest details of his past. While Janey tries to help James, she also reaches out to her enigmatic Aunt May, a retired librarian reputed to be the friend, perhaps even the lover, of popular mystery writer Bert Greenwood. When Janey attempts to solve the twin mysteries of why her great aunt has distanced herself from the family—and what her true relationship is with Bert Greenwood—Beulah provides the clues that lead Janey to uncover the secrets of her aunt's life. By the time Beulah's stay with Janey comes to an end, the people whose lives she's linked will discover that healing and reconciliation can come in the most unexpected ways.From Publishers WeeklyHearon's 17th book, the first since Ella in Bloom (2001), is a solid story of second chances and renewing family ties. Janey Daniels, 25, is taking a "sabbatical" in Vermont from her job as a pharmacist in Peachland, S.C., after her high school sweetheart and husband of five years dumps her for an ex-girlfriend. In Vermont, with its brilliantly colored Octobers and frigid winters, Janey bonds with Beulah, a Labrador puppy she's raising to become a companion for a blind person. It's while walking Beulah that she meets James Maarten, a potential boyfriend who is secretive about his past. At Janey's insistence, James eventually comes around to opening up and reconnecting with his family. Janey's attempts at intimacy, though, are sometimes rebuffed, leaving her with Beulah to love, socialize and wonder if she will ever be able to part with. In these moments, Janey's neediness is deeply felt, but she often appears far wiser and more even-keeled than her background and youth would allow, especially regarding her budding romance. Hearon's in good, but not top, form. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistJaney Daniels, 25, is a pharmacist in Peachland, South Carolina. When her husband of five years leaves her for an old girlfriend, she takes a one-year sabbatical in Vermont to avoid the talk. While there, she raises a puppy to be a companion dog for the blind. Walking Beulah at the dog park, she meets James Maarten. Coming from a place where everybody knows everything about everybody, Janey finds it hard to deal with his reserve, in the same way she finds it hard to deal with the idea of giving up Beulah. As her need for both of them grows, so does the intimacy. At the same time, she connects with Aunt May, the black sheep of the family, and finds an ally in a strange place. This is not just a cute-sad book about loving and losing a dog but instead a complex and very real story of love and loss, changing perspectives, and making the best of what life gives you. In Hearon's more than capable hands, it is a pleasure. Elizabeth DickieCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

With wit and feeling Shelby Hearon takes us into the life and world of Cile Tait, age thirty-nine, of Waco, Texas. A woman of charm and integrity, she summons up the courage to burn her bridges and defect from her marriage to the Grace Presbyterian Church's minister, only to be stunned by the complete lack of flame, smoke or hubbub of any kind that follows. Here is an inner-directed, sensuous, self-liberated woman impelled to make a place for herself in a society where church-centered propriety (embodied in her preacher-husband, whose constricting bed and board she leaves) mingles with country-style macho (in the person of Andy, her long-lost high school sweetheart and hug-dancing partner, who resurfaces and reclaims her)... and with the eternal Dallas dash (Andy's bandbox-stylish wife). It is a new world where superconducting supercolliders, threatening famlands, have brought into the area a global mix of superscientists (including the beautiful Korean who may be...

In Her Most Searching and most accomplished novel to date, the author of Owning Jolene and Hug Dancing explores friendship and loss — and what binds two women together and what separates them. Sarah and Harriet, now in their mid-fifties, have been friends since boarding school. Their lives — Sarah in the Blue Ridge mountains of South Carolina and Harriet in the piney woods of East Texas — have run parallel courses: marriage, babies, even opting for separate bedrooms from their husbands at about the same time.Or are their paths really so similar? Now they find themselves, within the same year, widowed — and deep-rooted differences surface. For Sarah, marriage was a destructive snare; she finds freedom in nature, reward in a wallpaper business she has created (so women can make rooms of their own), and sexual satisfaction with a man in his late sixties who understands her needs. Harriet is lost, no longer employed as a wife; to protect herself she gets a...

Shelby Hearon has been widely praised for the insight, wit, and subtlety with which her novels limn the complexities of marriage and family ("What Jane Austen is to courtship, Shelby Hearon is to marriage" --New York Newsday), and the ways in which place can profoundly affect us all. Now, with Ella in Bloom, Hearon gives us her sharpest, funniest, most telling novel yet.It is the story of Ella, who has always lived in the shadow of her "perfect" older sister. A gutsy single parent eking out a living for herself and her intrepid teenage daughter Birdie, Ella invents a genteel life, writing to her mother in drought-baked Texas about her heirloom roses, her linen dresses, and other amenities of a respectable life in Old Metairie, Louisiana. Little does her mother know about the run-down, scruffy house Ella really lives in, or that she makes ends meet by watering rich people's houseplants when they flee the coastal summer heat.But when Ella's beautiful...

From the time she was seven, Jolene Temple has been a pawn between her feuding parents, each of whom has become practiced in kidnapping her from the other. She has been left emotionally suspended between two philosophies of life: that of her stolid, conventional father, "always saving for a rainy day," and of her recklessly adventurous mother, "always saying she enjoyed a little shower." Having adopted a different disguise each time her mother stole her away, at 19 Jolene is still unsure of her real identity; she is at ease only in acting a role. When she meets bland L. W. Dawson, she thinks he holds the answers to her quest to be "normal." Meanwhile, however, she has been posing for, and has become the mistress of, middle-aged, twice-divorced artist Henry Wozencrantz, who has much to teach her about facing life without running away. Set in present-day Texas of oil-bust hard times ("the whole state is claiming Chapter Eleven"), the novel delivers wickedly funny, incisive social...