Big Stone Gap

Since it's the price, sometimes stratospheric, that puts most people off buying unabridged audio books, an introductory offer that allows first-time subscribers to buy three books at half price, with a further 20% off anything by the "Author of the Month", sounds like a brilliant deal. I confess that up to now I had never heard of award-winning American novelist Adriana Trigiani, Whole Story Audio's chosen author for September. Her books run along the same smalltown America lines laid down by Sinclair Lewis's classic Main Street, published in 1920, and afterwards imitated by Garrison Keillor, Anne Tyler and other exponents of the homespun, feelgood school of writing. Big Stone Gap is a one-horse town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where the women talk about their apple butter buns, the men their flatbed trucks, and everyone is married (some more happily than others), apart from the narrator, 35-year-old Ave Maria Mulligan. Yes, honestly, Ave Maria, just like the prayer. The town's two bestlooking guys have asked her to marry them - one has a butt that "makes a pair of Levi's sing" - so why is she still the town spinster? Because she has issues. I'm not sure about the message, but I loved the medium. Kate Forbes's honey-coated southern accents could make a Latin primer sing.