From best-selling author Anne Rivers Siddons comes a bittersweet and finely wrought story of friendship, family, and charleston society.

At twelve, Emily Parmenter is left mostly to herself alter her mother disappears and her beloved older brother dies. Emily has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise hunting spaniels. It is a meager, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic.

And then comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic Charleston debutante season. Where Emily's father sees Lulu as an entree to society, Emily is threatened and mystified. Lulu has a powerful enchantment of her own, and this, along with the dark, crippling secret she brings with her, will inevitably blow family's world apart and let the real one in—but at a terrible price.

Anne Rivers Siddons's best-selling novels include Nora. Nora, Low Country, Up Island. Fault Lines. Downtown, Hill Towns. Colony, Outer Banks, King's Oak Peachtree Road, Homeplace. Fox's Earth, The House Next Door, and Heartbreak Hotel. She is also the author of a work of nonfiction, John Chancellor Makes Me Cry. She and her husband, Heyward, split their time between their home in Charleston, South Carolina, and Brooklin, Maine