Mary Faith Rapple is smart, pretty in a rangy, gray-eyed sort of way—and very definitely pregnant. Not an unusual occurrence in the sleepy town of Due East, South Carolina. But when Mary faith announces that she will have a virgin birth and her father, Jesse Rapple, owner of the Plaid King filling station, vows to uncover the truth, the sparks begin to fly. Spirited, evocative, and utterly delightful, this brilliant novel by Valerie Sayers explores the love and loneliness, the hopes and fears, the unspoken yearnings of the human heart. Due East is a sweet and tender novel. Like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, Sayers writers with compassion of lonely characters whose lives are slightly off center, and her best scenes have a fine sense, sharp edge of irony. Her chosen territory is the human heart.

Mary Faith Rapple wonders when her lover will stop making promise he can’t keep—and leave his wife at last. But Mary Faith isn’t the only woman in town with man troubles, for everyone has someone they want, someone they can’t have, and someone they want to forget. Sayers has a gift for voice and the honest, gritty commentary about human behavior. This book offers her own version of the humor that Southern writers from Eudora Welty to Flannery O’Connor to Reynolds Price use so tellingly. Sayers’ novel is a skillful and well-crafted book which should appeal to readers of intelligent fiction.

Sayers's gift for delineating family relationships against the microcosm of a small Southern town grows more assured with each novel. This third book to be set in Due East, S.C., focuses on the Irish Catholic Rooney family, outsiders in the community because of their religion. Dolores Rooney's New York origins and her outspoken championing of integration. On the unseasonably warm November day in 1963 during which most of the story takes place, Dolores ruminates over her fifth pregnancy and what it will mean to the family's already shaky finances, and Bill Rooney hopes to sell a prize piece of real estate to help his faltering business, meanwhile thinking bitter thoughts about Dolores's sanctimonious piety and intellectual superiority. Eleven-year-old Kate feels the stirrings of sexuality, and gains some insights from her teenage brothers. And a New York Times reporter whom Dolores brings home to dinner trains a spotlight on their inner lives and sets in motion an event whose implications will reverberate down the years. Then President Kennedy's assassination unites them in terrible grief. Sayers's prose has verve and humor, her view of Southern life is clear-eyed, authentic and generous. Her compassionate understanding of the strains, worries and missed communications of marriage gives this book depth and staying power.