The epic, unforgettable love story of a man determined to protect the woman he loves from the town desperate to destroy her--this visceral and haunting debut heralds the arrival of a major new voice in fictionEphram Jennings has never forgotten the beautiful girl with the long braids running through the piney woods of Liberty, their small East Texas town. Young Ruby, "the kind of pretty it hurt to look at," has suffered beyond imagining, so as soon as she can, she flees suffocating Liberty for the bright pull of 1950s New York. Ruby quickly winds her way into the ripe center of the city--the darkened piano bars and hidden alleyways of the Village--all the while hoping to see the red hair and green eyes of her mother. When the funeral of her childhood best friend forces her to return home, thirty-year-old Ruby Bell will find herself reliving the devastating violence of her girlhood. With the terrifying realization that she might not be strong enough to fight her way back out, Ruby struggles to survive her memories of the town's dark past. Meanwhile, Ephram must choose between loyalty to the sister who raised him and the chance for a life with the woman he has loved since he was a boy.     Full of life, exquisitely written, and suffused with the pastoral beauty of the rural South, Ruby carries the reader along in a rush: through the red dust and gossip of Main Street, to the pit fire where men swill bootleg outside Bloom's Juke, to Celia Jennings's kitchen where a cake is being made, yolk by yolk, that Ephram will use to try to begin again with Ruby. With a sense of the poetry and power of Toni Morrison, an ingenious structure, and a breathtaking, lyrical prose all her own, Cynthia Bond creates an unflinching portrait of man's dark acts and the promise of the redemptive power of love.