The Annunciation

Ellen Gilchrist’s debut novel expands the thematic and visual landscapes the author made indelibly hers in radiantly spun stories. The Annunciation follows the desires of Amanda an unwed mother on a Mississippi Delta plantation at age fourteen, a wealthy New Orleans matron until her early forties, and now a divorced poetry student living in a university community in the Ozarks. When Amanda finds herself infatuated with an intense young musician, what at first appears to be a sexual intrigue becomes a grand and impossible passion that unfolds with striking parallels to the life of the eighteenth-century French poetess whose work she is translating.