num_pages: 272
description: It's 1978, and Ave Maria Mulligan is the thirty-five-year-old self-proclaimed spinster of Big Stone Gap, a sleepy hamlet in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She's also the local pharmacist, the co-captain of the Rescue Squad, and the director of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, the town's long-running Outdoor Drama. Ave Maria is content with her life of doing errands and negotiating small details-until she discovers a skeleton in her family's formerly tidy closet that completely unravels her quiet, conventional life. Suddenly, she finds herself juggling two marriage proposals, conducting a no-holds-barred family feud, planning a life-changing journey to the Old Country, and helping her best friend, the high-school band director, design a halftime show to dazzle Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed Hollywood movie star who's coming through town on a campaign stump with her husband, senatorial candidate John Warner.Filled with big-time eccentrics and small-town shenanigans, Big Stone Gap is a jewel box of original characters, including sexpot Bookmobile librarian Iva Lou Wade; Fleeta Mullins, the chain-smoking pharmacy cashier with a penchant for professional wrestling; the dashing visionary Theodore Tipton; Elmo Gaspar, the snake-handling preacher; Jack MacChesney, a coal-mining bachelor looking for true love; and Pearl Grimes, a shy mountain girl on the verge of a miraculous transformation. Comic and compassionate, Big Stone Gap is is the story of a woman who thinks life has passed her by, only to learn that the best is yet to come.
  About the Author:
Adriana Trigiani grew up in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, in the 1970s. She has honed her storytelling abilities over a decade of writing and producing some of television's top-rated shows, including the groundbreaking Cosby Show. Trigiani is also an award-winning playwright and documentary filmmaker. She lives in New York City with her husband.
language: English
title: Big Stone Gap
titlecomplete: Big Stone Gap (Big Stone Gap, # 1)
characters: Elmo Gaspar, Elizabeth Taylor, Meoli Vilminore, Gala Nuccio, Iva Lou Wade, Spec, Otto, Theodore Tipton, Lyle Makin, Nan MacChesney, Ave Maria Mulligan, Jack "Jack Mac" MacChesney, Tayloe Slagle, Aunt Cecelia, Nellie Goodloe, Fleeta Mullins, Mario Barbari, Inez Eisenberg, Zia Antonietta, Lew Eisenberg, Aunt Alice, Worley, Uncle Wayne, Pearl Grimes, John Warner, Betty Slagle
genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Southern, Audiobook, Chick Lit, Adult, Book Club, Romance, Adult Fiction, Historical Fiction
ratings_count: 45874
places: Virginia, Big Stone Gap, Virginia
series: Big Stone Gap
publisher: Random House