We were getting ready to leave – we did not know if we would return. If the seaweed broods over its loosened roots, it can never glide on a current. So begins the bittersweet account of Kolumban, the man of the family, the player of the lute in his community of itinerant bards. The paanar live near forests, but do not know how to hunt. There are fields of millet behind their huts but they are unused to sowing or reaping. Tired of depending on song and dance to make a living, and the attendant poverty, the eldest son, Mayilan, runs away from home. Many years later his family sets out to find him. As they roam the land, they perform in village commons and palaces, to farmers and cowherds, and famous kings and even more famous poets. Set seventeen centuries ago, The Day the Earth Bloomed tells the intertwined stories of Kolumban, his daughter Chithira and son Mayilan, drawing on the celebrated poems of classical Tamil. The result is an electrifying and haunting connection to the past.

"That whole summer is as clear and as still in my head as the corsage under the glass bell in Mrs. Tate's parlor. Even now, summers and summers since, I can remember everything. I remember the day summer started." So begins Lee Smith's disarming first novel, written while she was an undergraduate at Hollins College and a winner in 1968 of the Book-of-the-Month Club Writing Fellowship Contest. The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, set in a small southern town at midcentury, tells the story of nine-year-old Susan, for whom the first bright, carefree, promise-filled days of summer slowly evolve into a time of innocence lost and childhood illusions shattered. Susan's mother is vain and frivolous, her father loving but distracted, and her sister, several years her senior, is coping with the first stirrings of serious love. Susan's circle of young friends is joined for the summer by Eugene, the frail, strange nephew of a neighbor. As the months pass, Susan witnesses the disintegration of her parents' marriage and learns from Eugene the cruelty people sometimes resort to. Lyrical and fanciful in spite of its dark moments, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed puts on ample display the remarkable talent that has made Lee Smith one of our most popular writers of fiction.

In the orchard a honey bee buzzes. Its legs brush pollen inside a fragrant pink flower: A small green fruit begins to grow and grow and grow.... Peaches and peas and even peanuts -- they all begin with a single flower: How? Open this book and find out!