By: Ellen Gilchrist
Fiction Hardcover Edition
May 2008


Ellen Gilchrist is one of America's most celebrated and respected authors, a classic writer in the tradition of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Elizabeth Spencer. The author of more than twenty books, she was awarded the National Book Award for her short story collection Victory Over Japan. Now, with her first novel in more than a decade, she returns in top form.

A Dangerous Age tells the story of the women of the Hand family, three cousins in a Southern dynasty rich with history and tradition who are no strangers to either controversy or sadness. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, the novel is a celebration of the strength of these women, and of others like them. In her characteristically clear and direct prose, with its wry, no-nonsense approach to the world and the people who inhabit it, Gilchrist gives voice to women on a collision course with a distant war that, in truth, is never more than a breath away.

As the Washington Post has said, "To say that Ellen Gilchrist can write is to say that Placido Domingo can sing. All you need to do is listen."


From the Inside Flap: The women in the Hand family are no strangers to controversy or sadness. Those traits seem, in fact, to be a part of their family's Southern heritage, one that stretches back through several generations. For Louise Hand, it means coping with the possible loss of the young man she has improbably fallen in love with, especially now that he has vowed revenge for the injuries suffered by his twin brother in Iraq.

Winifred Hand's loss came before the war began, when her fiance flew to New York for an early morning meeting at the World Trade enter on 9/11. Now just as she is starting to experience life again, the war once more threatens to take away what happiness she has found.

And for Olivia Hand, the strong-willed independent editor of Tulsa, Oklahoma's preeminent newspaper, the war is a subject for editorials, a far-off conflict that she can write about with both passion and detachment - until her newly wedded husband gets called up for service.

All three are reconnecting the pieces of their lives and rediscovering love. But each is unwittingly on a collision course with a seemingly distant war that is really never more than a breath away. By turns humorous and heartbreaking, A Dangerous Age is a celebration of the strength of these women and of the bonds of blood and shared loss that hold them together. Haunting and elegantly crafted, it is a wonderfully human story about the centuries-old struggle of women who are left to carry on with life when their men go off to war, by a writer the Washington Post says "should be declared a national cultural treasure."