Synopsis
'As unexpectedly beguiling as it is affecting.' Daily Mail
Since his award-winning debut collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson's work has been as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America. Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, he explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early-twentieth-century Mississippi with a genital birth defect that would stand in the way of the central "uses" for a woman in that time and place - namely, sex and marriage.
From the country doctor who adopts Jane to the hard tactile labor of farm life, from the sensual and erotic world of nature around her to the boy who loved but was forced to leave her, the world of Miss Jane Chisolm is anything but barren. Free to satisfy only herself, she mesmerizes those around her, exerting an unearthly fascination that lives beyond her still.
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Reviews
“Exquisitely written . . . life in all of its unsentimental and symphonic complexity . . . Miss Jane is an artistic triumph, a novel that will linger inside you as long as your own memories do. Brad Watson's gifts are immense.”Andre Dubus III
“Miss Jane is both winning and big-hearted in its embrace of and appreciation for what seems to be a disabling difference. One of its great pleasures is its young protagonist's flowering from loneliness to a new understanding of her place within creation.”Jim Shepard
“A bittersweet southern pastoral, the story of a forgotten woman written with unearthly beauty. If Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor had a child, it would be Brad Watson.”A. M. Homes, 'Best books of 2016', Guardian
“For a beautifully observed study of a hopeless life bravely endured: Brad Watson’s Miss Jane, the story of an early-20th-century Mississippi woman with a devastating physical anomaly.”Anne Tyler, New York Times
