{"product_id":"9781570031496","title":"Charley Bland","description":"\u003cb\u003eA dissection of family existence at its most corrosive\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this moving and brilliant narrative of doomed love, Mary Lee Settle tells of a triangular affair set in the small town of Canona, West Virginia. The novel's narrator, a thirty-five-year-old widow and writer, returns from a self-imposed European exile to find her hometown much as she left it decades ago. One thing does change upon her arrival, however; she takes Charley Bland, Canona's most eligible bachelor and the object of her schoolgirl crush, as her lover. The third person in the profane trinity is Charley's mother, a woman who believes no female worthy of her son. Mrs. Bland serves to fuel the lovers' creativity as they arrange clandestine meetings. With trademark skill and wit, Settle spins a bittersweet story in which she artfully reveals the mores of Canona's closed, upper-class society and of its less prosperous underculture.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of South Carolina Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47055087042800,"sku":"9781570031496","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781570031496_p0.jpg?v=1763766317","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781570031496","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}