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Thom and Abby Sadler, a brother and sister close in age and temperament, enjoyed an apparently solid, middle-class upbringing. But as adults, after Thom has come out as a gay man and Abby has become the dutiful companion to their mother, they suffer an estrangement during a family crisis. When their father dies, Abby moves to Philadelphia with her mother, who grew up there, while Thom stays in Atlanta and cobbles together a new "family" with his close friends and the occasional, fleeting lover.
As the novel opens, four years have passed, and Thom is finally reaching out to Abby, having learned he is HIV-positive. Abby flies to Atlanta, but instead of returning north, Abby comes to enjoy the vacation from her job teaching in a girls' school and from the fallout after a broken engagement. The charismatic Thom has a colorful group of gay friends, in whose lives Abby becomes involved even as she embarks on an erotic affair with a mysterious, black-clad man she meets at a party; she also begins a tentative friendship with an eccentric woman she met on the airplane. Meanwhile Thom struggles to build a loving partnership with a much younger man while also hoping to forge a reconciliation with his beloved sister and ultimately with their difficult, possessive mother.
Author: Greg Johnson
Hardcover Published October 2001 317 pages