Stiff Hearts

Stiff Hearts

By: Jo Deniau

Jo Deniau's debut novel is based on the adventures and mishaps of her mother in mid-1950s Greenwich Village.

At the end of twenty-year-old Gillian Rysert's train journey from St. Louis to New York City in 1949, she believes she's escaped her hillbilly mother's legacy: some extreme physical code or language of survival transmitted by the blow of a fist on someone's jaw or a gun firing far away in the woods.

Magnetized to violence by her mother and bereft of her father,...