The New York Times hailed Martha Southgate's previous novel, The Fall of Rome, as “powerful," O, the Oprah Magazine called it “quietly accomplished," and Essence lauded it as “a bracingly honest look at race, class, and self-acceptance." With Third Girl from the Left, Southgate brings her acute vision and emotional scope to a larger canvas. This enormously entertaining yet serious novel tells a story of African-American women struggling against all odds to express what lies deepest in their hearts. Like Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, it ranges freely through time, fact, and fiction to weave an enthralling story about history and art and their place in the lives of three women. “My mother believed in the power of movies and the people in them to change a life, to change her life." So explains Tamara, daughter of Angela, granddaughter of Mildred — the three women whose lives are portrayed in...

Award-winning novelist Martha Southgate (who, in the words of Julia Glass, "can write fat and hot, then lush and tender, then just plain truthful and burning with heart") now tells the story of a family pushed to its limits by addiction over the course of two generations.Josie Henderson loves the water and is fulfilled by her position as the only senior-level black scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family back in landlocked Cleveland. Her adored brother, Tick, was her childhood ally as they watched their drinking father push away all the love that his wife and children were trying to give him. Now Tick himself has been coming apart and demands to be heard.Weaving four voices into a beautiful tapestry, Southgate charts the lives of the Hendersons from the parents' first charmed meeting to Josie's realization that the ways of the human heart are more complex...