Title: Strange birds in the tree of heaven
First published: 1999
Description: "In Karen Salyer McElmurray's debut novel, we are invited to explore the boundaries between beliefs, desires, obsessions, and madness. Set in Mining Hollow, Kentucky, we meet Ruth Blue Wallen; her husband, Earl; and their son, Andrew. Ruth longs to know God, the only escape she can find in a world that has shown her spiritual, emotional, and sensual defeat. Earl yearns for the music-making of his past, now forgone in order to make a living as a coal miner.

Andrew desires the love of a boyhood friend, an expression of love considered sinful in rural Kentucky. And, with the divinely inspired yet tormenting help of his mother, in a world of deeply and tragically conflicting desires, Andrew must choose to live or die - he must choose an uncertain love or nothing at all."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Parent and adult child, Fiction, Mothers and sons, Parent and adult child -- Fiction, Fiction, family life, Fiction, historical, Fiction, psychological, Mothers and sons, fiction, Kentucky, fiction, Fiction, historical, general, Coal mines and mining, Gay men, Rural conditions
Places: Kentucky