Author Description

Once upon a time, in a castle of white limestone and feldspar, in a strange land called... Texas, there lived a maiden. Her father, and mother, and uncle, and grandfather, and grandmother, and great-aunts, and great-grandmother had fought a secret feud with a subtle enemy. Now they were all dead. She was very, very rich. No one in the town of Bernice had ever seen her. And she lived all alone. (Except for her servant. And her plants. And her books. And an industrial-duty elevator. And the stories, of course.). She consumed stories - feasting on documents, drinking in secrets, swallowing revenge, ingesting despair; devouring follies, and gorging on obsession. She was sustained by the past, and the tale of her family and its fight to the death, from the turn of the century to the present day. And she was content, alone with her plants, until the day there came a knocking at the door.... The New York Times praised Carol Dawson's first novel as "a moving debut... filled with prose that is restrained and precise." Now, with Body of Knowledge, she throws restraint to the winds and offers a novel as huge, vibrant, and outrageous as its 600-pound narrator. Here are characters who will linger in your memory long after the last page is turned. But most of all, here is a storyteller, Victoria Grace Ransom, who defies description and is unlike any character you've ever met. As her engrossing history unfolds, you'll find yourself drawn deeper and deeper into her Body of Knowledge.