The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia - Tapa dura

"Wonderfully seductive, one of those rare books you disappear into wholly. It's joyous, shamelessly funny, heartbreaking, and page after page it gives you what you didn't expect. This is a novel you'll want to hand deliver to a friend." -- David Long, author of The Inhabited World "Wonderfully engaging ... a great tribute to the power of education, strong women and the fine art of storytelling... an intricate dazzling pattern of history and imagination and truth." -- Jill McCorkle, author of Going Away Shoes "This novel has strong, long legs. I hope it walks forever. Besides delivering suspenseful, eloquently detailed, non-sentimental prose, it spoons out a big dose of clarity that America needs." -- Clyde Edgerton, author of The Bible Salesman "Mary Helen Stefaniak is a born storyteller, with a fantastic gift for mingling the exotic and the ordinary, the comic and the heartrending. Her tale of drastic change coming to a small Southern town in the 1930s is filled with wild incidents, vivid characters, and a surprise at every turn-a delight to read." -- Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books "A heartfelt, redemptive, and irresistible novel. Stefaniak knows that every story is many stories, and she handles the complex tales of romance, family, race relations, and secrets with intelligence, grace, and tenderness." -- John Dufresne, author of Louisiana Power & Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little

Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new, well-traveled young schoolteacher turns a small Georgia town upside down. Miss Grace Spivey believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad bazaar. Miss Spivey transforms the lives of everyone around her: Gladys's older brother Force (with his movie-star looks), her pregnant sister May (a gifted storyteller herself), and especially the Cailiffs' African American neighbor, young Theo Boykin, whose creative genius becomes the key to a colorful, hidden history of the South. Populated by unforgettable characters including three impressive camels The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from a segregated schoolroom in Georgia to the banks of the Tigris (and back again) in an entrancing feat of storytelling."