Sights Unseen

To the good citizens of Bend of the River, North Carolina, the exotic Maggie Barnes is 'not right,' 'flighty,' or more politely, 'the Barnes woman with all her problems.' To her family, and most particularly her growing daughter Hattiw, Maggie is a maddening and beloved paradox: quite clearly depressive, yet a beautiful, generous, satin-clad siren, vivacious and captivating, infuriating, violent and heartless. Through Hattie's eye a profoundly original and devastating portrait of her mother unfolds. Wry, irresistably comic yet unsparing in its depiction of a child's despairing love. SIGHTS UNSEEN is also the story of the marvellous extended Barnes family. With their separate strategies for dealing with the impossible Maggie, all are drawn with the tenderness and humour and suffuse this extraordinary novel finally not with pain but with redemptive joy.