On Boneyard Island, Georgia, where everyone's weirdly kin, 13-year-old Lucille is marooned when her mother goes AWOL with an old flame, leaving Lucille with only her father's ashes, two half-siblings, and Will, the misanthropic manager of the island's only motel. The abandonment kills hope of Lucille's promised snorkeling trip to the Florida Reef before ocean heat kills the coral and illusions she's harbored about her mother's sanity. Everybody Here Is Kin explores the lives of this sinking family, the island community, and fears of exposing wounds, old and new, when natural disaster forces them to trust, and depend on, strangers.

In Everybody Here Is Kin, BettyJoyce Nash tells a coming-of-age tale that challenges notions of motherhood, both familial and as guardians of the Earth. Lucille is a girl on the brink of adolescence whose intelligence is matched only by her intuitive knowledge of the natural world-where she's been left to monitor her two younger stepsiblings. This story transcends time and place and will be a joy for anyone who loves this transient world. -Gale Massey, author of The Girl from Blind River, Rising and Other Stories

This novel makes your heart swell, waterlogged with love and admiration. BettyJoyce Nash's heroine, 13-year-old Lucille, worries about the planet sinking into the ocean, even as everyone in her life is going under, including the cranky motel manager, Will. Whom can she save and whom can she trust? Living inside Lucille's head is a rare treat in BettyJoyce Nash's astute, funny, and poignant book. -Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of Man Alive! a Washington Post Notable Book, The Bowl Is Already Broken , and The Frequency of Souls.

What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964's Freedom Summer. That fall Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement. Ultimately the radical group Weatherman destroys the "family" Alex and Ted have created, and in 1971 Ted disappears while under FBI investigation. When Ted surfaces eleven years later, Alex must put her life back together in order to discover what true family means.

Lee Zacharias has received two silver medals from the Independent Book Publisher Awards, won North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work has been reprinted and frequently cited in the annual volumes of The Best American Essays. You can read more about her at www.leezacharias.com.