Still Love in Strange Places: A Memoir Book

A love story and a journey across the continents of marriage. When Beth Kephart met and fell in love with the artist who would become her husband, she had little knowledge of the place he came from—an exotic coffee farm high in the jungle hills of El Salvador, a place of terrifying myths and even more frightening realities, of civil war and devastating earthquakes. Yet, marriage, she finds, means taking in not only the stranger who is one's lover but also a stranger's history—in this case, a country, language, people, and culture utterly foreign to a young American woman. Kephart's transcendently lyrical prose (often compared to the work of Annie Dillard) has already made her a National Book Award finalist. In each of her memoirs she has written about love, using her own life to seek out universal truths. "Unclouding the lens through which she looks at her husband...becomes her difficult, powerful act of love" (Washington Post). Kephart's "lush...poetic evocation of Salvadorian life, its magic and tragedies" (Los Angeles Times) offers her testament to the ties that bind: to the chosen love of a man, and the necessary love of the place he comes from. "This luminous memoir [goes] deep into the territory of her marriage, and straight to the heart of the embattled, beautiful country her husband calls home" (Katrina Kenison). 19 b/w photographs. Reading group guide included.Read More