Falling Women and Other Stories

Award-winning short stories from "...a Southern author to celebrate, with a wry wit that’s free range and delicious" (Richard Peabody, Editor, 'Gargoyle Magazine') about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother afraid of passing her water phobia to her son.

Braxton, North Carolina is the 'where' in these stories, an imaginary coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where its citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton's babysitters are dangerous, snooping, stealing secrets - and husbands.

But love abounds. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend.

"Short stories that burn like incense...The magic comes in the manner in which Herbert relates bits of secrets and gossip and confessions and unbearably ordinary lives. She has given us a panoply of life - and there probably is not a person here you could say you haven't known. You can still smell the incense long into the night. That is a feat - and she has accomplished it!" Grady Harp, Amazon Hall of Fame Reviewer