At Home on St. Simons

The millions who have read Eugenia Price's novels know that central to each of her stories is a strong, deeply rooted sense of place, and readers quickly fall in love with Price 's settings. For thirty years, faithful readers have followed Price to the vivid worlds of her Georgia trilogy, her Florida trilogy, her Savannah quartet, and her many other novels. Her stories of local people and the homes where their stories unfold easily become familiar, loved places.

"That a house, a locale, is central to all my novels, makes good sense," Ms. Price believes. "I am and have always been almost overly sensitive to the house, the place in which I live. Finding St. Simons Island changed my very life-its tempo, its basic simple quality, even my own capacity for lasting relationships.

Here, Eugenia shares with her worldwide reading public some of what life was like during the first years in which she and her best friend and fellow writer, Joyce Blackburn, were becoming Islanders. "These short pieces," she says, "include my observations day by day of what it was like at last to be at home on St. Simons. We were learning how to be neighbors, after so many years of complex life in the huge northern city of Chicago; learning how to care deeply for people with whom, at first glace, we had little in common. We were understanding what it really meant to come home."

Eugenia Price, called by many St. Simons' own "beloved invader," here shows readers those early years as they were being lived. Her cherished ST. SIMONS MEMOIR was written from memory and notes in old desk calendars, but AT HOME ON ST. SIMONS illuminates some of the experiences which most shaped and changed Eugenia-written as they occured.

In the opening chapter, Ms. Price attempts to explain-almost as though to herself-why, in the face of such drastic change on the small, once provincial island on the Georgia coast, she is still at home on St. Simons. Her emotional connection to the island and her sense of place absorb local St. Simons readers as well as those who have never seen the island firsthand.

Millions have read Eugenia Price's books, which have been translated into more that fifteen languages. The formative, poignant moments related in AT HOME ON ST. SIMONS bring a universal appeal to this singular volume that retraces the beginning of Price's real-life love for St. Simons Island.