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    Unkept
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    Unkept
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    Unkept
    Ebook289 pages4 hours

    Unkept

    By Ericka Clay

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    As the live-in manager at her father’s funeral home in Burling Gates, Missouri, Vienna Oaks has succumbed to the mediocrity and abject loneliness of her life. Her days are suspended between the mundane and the misery of her clients’ throttling grief, of changing light bulbs, and encountering strangers as bereft as she. But after orchestrating the funeral for a little boy named Parker prompts a severe panic attack, she finds herself at a personal crossroads in which she is forced to confront the pregnancy she’s been hiding, her childhood nemesis, the boy she never stopped loving, and the deep-seated secret surrounding her mother’s death more than a decade before.

    In another part of town, Heather Turnbull has just learned from her estranged father that her mother, a lifelong recluse, has died. When making arrangements for her funeral, Heather chooses Oaks Family Funeral home, where she comes face to face with Vienna – the woman she tortured throughout grade school, the woman who has recently had an affair with her husband.

    Together, Vienna and Heather navigate through a makeshift friendship born of circumstance and devised to assuage their ambivalence towards motherhood and their tenuous relationship with reality, discovering, in tandem, the art of forgiveness and the will to go on.

    With humor and poignancy, Ericka Clay’s debut novel, Unkept, explores the thorny landscape of childhood trauma and the ferocious politics between little girls — and the adults they become.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBannerwing Books
    Release dateMar 2, 2015
    ISBN9781311775238
    Unavailable
    Unkept
    Author

    Ericka Clay

    Ericka Clay is a published novelist and the author of A Violent Hope, Unkept, and Dear Hearts. She has been awarded a number of times by Writers Digest for various short fiction pieces and placed as a quarter-finalist in the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest for her novel, Cooper Cooper. She is working on her next novel, A Bird Alone, due to be completed Summer 2023. Ericka lives in Northwest Arkansas with her husband, daughter, one dog (RIP Roxie), and an insatiable need to push buttons, both figuratively and literally. You can find her at erickaclay.com.

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