Virginia book notes

By: | Times-Dispatch
Published: January 03, 2010

With winter in full swing, many people enjoy curling up under a throw with some entertaining fiction, and these three authors deliver.

. . .

The Ober-prolific Donna Ball has published more than 80 works of fiction since 1982 and shows no sign of slowing down.

That's a treat for her readers, and particularly those with a fondness for Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Last spring, she began a new series with "A Year on Ladybug Farm," in which three women bought a run-down mansion in the Valley and renovated it.

Less than a year later, she updates their lives in At Home on Ladybug Farm (344 pages, Berkley, $14) -- and those lives are thrown into crisis.

Ball left suburban Atlanta in 1992 for the Georgia mountains, where she restored an old barn, learned the perils of do-it-yourself endeavors and adapted to life in a rural community. Her life experiences ring true as fiction in her latest novel.

. . .

A dozen short stories make up In an Uncharted Country (186 pages, Press 53, $14), the latest offering from Staunton author Clifford Garstang, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

These taut, Virginia-set stories explore a variety of emotional landscapes and showcase the characters at times of loss.

Garstang's work has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including the Virginia Quarterly Review and Shenandoah.

. . .

Former journalist Ken Byerly has lived in a number of places. Born in North Carolina, he grew up in Wyoming and now lives in Vermont.

But it was his time in Virginia as editor of The Tidewater Review that helped inspire Mountain Girl (312 pages, AuthorHouse, $15.49).

"Mountain Girl" tells the story of Wade Talbot, who starts as editor of a weekly newspaper in North Carolina and becomes a reporter in New York during the civil-rights movement in the 1960s. He romanticizes his Southern background. Becky Anderson is a product of a small Southern town who becomes a power in the movie business and wants to leave her Southern past behind.

But the two are attracted and live out a'60s story that resonates with Byerly's background.

-- Jay Strafford