The Madam Hardback - 2003

In writing "The Madam," award-winning storyteller and bestselling author Julianna Baggott turns her eye to her own family history, creating a masterful novel based on the lives of her grandmother, who was raised in a house of prostitution, and her great-grandmother, who was the madam. The result is a passionate, richly detailed account of the business of lust and the human soul -- gracious, corrosive, resilient.

It's 1924 in an industrial town in West Virginia. Alma works in a hosiery mill where the percussive roar of machinery has far too long muf_ed the engine that is her heart. When her husband decides that they should set out to _nd their fortune in Florida, Alma is torn. Ultimately she agrees and they leave behind their three children, a boarding house of show people, a dead vaudeville bear, and Alma's ailing mother. But their fragile marriage soon collapses. Abandoned by her husband on a Miami dock, Alma is suddenly forced to make her own way in the world. With the help of a gentle giantess and an opium-addicted prostitute, Alma reclaims her children, forging a new family, and commits herself to a life set apart from the world she knows. She chooses to run a whore house, a harvest that relies on lust and weakness of which "the world has a generous, unending supply."

As her children grow older, however, Alma's love for them becomes desperate -- especially for her daughter Lettie, who, at _fteen, disappears. Alma draws on the _erce strength of the unlikely cast of women around her, and the novel careens to its shocking, redemptive, unforgettable ending.

Written in stunning, incandescent prose, "The Madam" is a literary page-turner that takes on brutal realities. Itis a story of the unbreakable bonds between women who triumph and, more heroically, endure.