Miss Dreamsville

A brilliant debut novel from a New York Times bestselling author about a transplanted wife from Boston who arrives in Florida in the 1960s, starts a literary salon, and shakes up the status quo. Eighty-year-old Dora, the narrator of a story that began a half century earlier, is bonding with an unlikely set of friends, including Jackie Hart, a restless middle-aged wife and mother from Boston, who gets into all sorts of trouble when her family moves to a small, sleepy town in Collier County, Florida, circa 1962. With humor and insight the novel chronicles the awkward North-South cultural divide as Jackie, this hapless but charming "Yankee," looks for some excitement in her life by accepting an opportunity to host a local radio show where she creates a mysterious, late-night persona, "Miss Dreamsville," and by launching a reading group-the Collier County Women's Literary Society-thus sending the conservative and racially segregated town into uproar. The only townspeople who venture to join are regarded as outsiders at best-a young gay man, a divorced woman, a poet, and a young black woman who dreams of going to college. This brilliant fiction debut by Amy Hill Hearth, a New York Times bestselling author, brings to life unforgettable characters who found the one thing that eluded them as individuals: a place in the world. Inspired by a real person, Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society will touch the heart of anyone and everyone who has ever felt like an outsider longing to fit in.