Taking Lottie Home

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Taking Lottie Home is a story of generations bound inexplicably together by “the odd way that life, or circumstance, bumps people around, sends them colliding into one another.”  It is an elegantly written story of love given, love returned, and love remembered that no reader will ever forget. 

When Foster Lanier and Ben Phelps are released from a professional baseball team in 1904, it is the only experience they have in common until they meet a runaway – a girl- a woman named Lottie Parker – on the train that takes them from Augusta, Georgia, and away from their dreams of greatness. 

Foster will marry her and father her son.

Ben will escort her home.

And Lottie will change the lives of everyone she meets from the day she runs away until she finally finds the place where she belongs.

The story of Lottie reveals the life of a rare woman who never completely loses the innocence of her dreams—although she leaves home as a prostitute and works the girlie tent in a traveling carnival.  Her marriage to Foster and the birth of her son are part of her dream.  Having Ben care for her following Foster’s death, being accepted into the home of Margaret Phelps, Ben’s mother, and meeting Arthur Ledford, the father of Ben’s fiancée, are fragments of the dream as well.

With a turn-of-the-century setting affected by lingering memories of the Civil War Reconstruction and by startling promises of a new world—electricity, the telephone, the airplane, the automobile---Terry Kay returns with a store that honors the amazing capacity we have to love and care for one another that earned him international praise for his novel To Dance With the White Dog.

“Terry Kay’s best novels always happened when Kay himself falls in dazzling love with the characters his is creating.  When his engagement with those characters is total, he creates worlds where love sets all the rules, makes all the appointments, and breaks all the hearts.  This is Terry Kay country.  Terry has never created a woman he loves more than Lottie Lanier.  Taking Lottie Home is his best book.        

-Pat Conroy