NewSouth

"Charlotte Miller has illuminated a dark corner of the American South with remarkable grace and beauty. Behold, This Dreamer is an incredible debut novel."

--Melinda Haynes, author of Mother of Pearl,
the Oprah Book Club® selection for June 1999

"Behold, This Dreamer is a wonderful read. Charlotte Miller is a born story-teller whose characters come alive. I didn't want the book to end."

--Anne Carroll George, author of This One and Magic Life, and
Agatha award-winning author of the Southern Sisters mysteries

"Good news! Southern Literature is not dying. It is being revived by a writer named Charlotte Miller, and a press called NewSouth Books. Behold, This Dreamer reminds us of what we can't lose: the language of our people, the details of our land, the spiritual lust we crave--all of which Miller brings together in this masterful first novel."

--Vicki Covington, author of Night Ride Home, and co-author of Cleaving

"First time novelists just aren't supposed to be able to do things like this. Charlotte Miller has a superb sense of place and time, and in Janson Sanders, she has given us a character who goes right to the heart of some things that really matter: love of the land, the good kind of pride, and above all, pursuit of dreams."

--Robert Inman, author of Dairy Queen Days and Home Fires Burning

"Solidly grounded in the Southern rural scene, this is a compelling tale, which addresses questions of identity and the struggle of good with evil. A story vividly told and, from first to last, rewarding to read."

--Helen Norris, Poet Laureate of Alabama, recipient of the Harper Lee Award for Distinguished Alabama
Author 2000, and author of One Day in the Life of a Born Again Loser and The Christmas Wife

"You will fall in love with this sweeping tale of pride and passion and anxiously await the next segment of Charlotte Miller's trilogy, Behold, This Dreamer."

--Judith Richards, author of Summer Lightning and Too Blue To Fly

"In Behold, This Dreamer a flapper daughter of the 1920's in rural Georgia defies her tyrannical father and brothers by falling in love with a true-hearted farm hand from Alabama. You'll stay up late turning the pages of this suspenseful and inspiring tale. Charlotte Miller has created a world rich in period-piece details--the labor of hand-picking cotton from the red fields, the latest bobbed hair styles for women, the interior of a 1915 black Cadillac touring car. Bone-chilling scenes of cruelty between girl friends, between fathers and daughters, between abusive husbands and their wives, between land owners and sharecroppers serve as the background for characters who allow their hearts to shine out from the darkness."

--Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife; or, the Star-Gazer

"Charlotte Miller's Behold, This Dreamer is filled with the lush landscapes of the South rendered often in evocative and vivid language. Not simply a backdrop, this landscape is the very foundation upon which Miller builds the story of a man characterized by his hard work, dignity, pride, and determination. In him we see the struggles of the poor and disposessed. We behold not only the dreamer, but also the triumph of love."

--Natasha Trethewey, author of Domestic Work, and recipient of the ASCA Individual Arts Fellowship, 2000.

A new voice in the tradition of Erskine Caldwell.

Janson Sanders, part Cherokee, part poor-but-proud white, is a man intent on revenging his father's death and taking back the land stolen from him by a wealthy planter. In the process, he meets and falls in love with Elise Whitley, the daughter of another rich landowner who happens to operate an illegal bootlegging industry. In this desperate, dangerous world, Janson must fend off both rival bootleggers and honest policemen. A story of love, hope, poverty, and heartbreak, the protagonist struggles to find himself while being pulled in opposite directions toward his love and his dream.

A novel set against the contrasting backdrops of the small farm and sharecropping life in the South in the final days of King Cotton, and the frivolity and rapid change of the Jazz Age of the 1920's, Behold, This Dreamer opens a trilogy of novels that span the time period from the 1920's to the present, and that follow the development of the South from the cotton era to the South of today.

Read the First Chapter of Behold, This Dreamer

Trade Paper Edition:
July 2001
Trade Paper, 6x9 Inches, 512 Pages
ISBN 1-58838-061-0
$18.95

Hardcover Edition:
November 2000
Cloth, 6x9 Inches, 550 Pages
ISBN 1-58838-002-5
$27.95

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