On the day that Lucy Bondurant comes to live with her cousin, Sheppard Bondurant III, in the sprawling home on Peachtree Road, she is five and he is seven. But before that first day is over, she has taught him “two things that altered almost grotesquely the landscape and weather of my small life. I learned that not all women wept in the nights after the act of love. And I learned that we were rich.”

So begins Anne Rivers Siddons’s magnificent novel, a poignant love story about two star-crossed cousins whose tumultuous love-and-hate relationship is played out against the dramatically changing landscape of Atlanta over the last four decades.

Even at the age of five, Lucy Bondurant is notably headstrong, exuberant and independent. Though she is a devastating beauty, she will never become the demure Southern lady her mother and her society want her to be. Her older cousin Shep is also destined to be a failure in his family’s eyes — he is too shy and bookish to become the classically suave and gregarious Southern gentleman. The two grow up in Atlanta on Peachtree Road under the same elegant roof during the decades of the forties, fifties and sixties — rebels against the narrow and privileged aristocracy they unwillingly belong to. Peachtree Road is the story of their ultimately tragic relationship, of the friends and family who surround them and compose one the South’s most elite levels of society, and of the sleepy city that against all odds became the great metropolis of the New South.

Peachtree Road Hardcover — 566 pages Fiction — NEW! Buy Now $27.50