HARD RED SPRING

Hard Red Spring is a gorgeously written, sharp and thought-provoking historical saga based on true events. Following four American women who get tangled in the subversive history of 20th century Guatemala, it is the story of a country, a shadow history revealed through a central mystery involving the fate of a missing girl spanning one hundred years.

1902: A rural farm girl watches her family's fortunes vanish under a debt peonage labor system that exploits native workers and small farmers alike. 1954: The wife of the American Ambassador becomes entangled in a Cold War love affair that may have treasonous implications. 1983: An evangelical missionary strives to heal the wounds of civil war by bringing The Good News to Mayan refugees. 1999: A liberal tourist embarks on a Roots Tour with her adopted teenaged daughter. Though separated by decades and ideologies, these women's experiences of the land of eternal spring echo across a century with eerie reprisals of racism, intervention, and violence that become progressively more sophisticated and gruesome in an increasingly global world. Through vivid prose, vibrant characters, meticulous research, Kelly Kerney recreates the land of perpetual promise, of perpetually lovely weather, a land where a volcano erupts and the government denies to the buried towns that it's happened. Where all the one-way streets are decreed reversed, and a President decides to lead his entire country to Jesus. A land whose history is dominated by the shadow of the American Dream. KELLY KERNEY is the author of Born Again, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2006. A Booksense pick, Born Again was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library and was chosen as one of the thirty best debuts of the year by Kirkus. It earned glowing reviews from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus (starred), Publishers Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Booklist, The Raleigh News and Observer. Kelly is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. She earned her B.A. from Bowdoin and her M.F.A. from Notre Dame. She and her husband live in Richmond, Virginia.