Enduring (Stay More) - Tapa dura

Forty years ago, Donald Harington created the little town of Stay More, hidden away in the hills of the Ozarks. He populated it with generations of families who had escaped the Appalachians in search of something - more room, greener pastures, freedom from convention, sweeter air and water, or simply a world where time and history don't matter. The first person the author created to inhabit his town was a woman, Latha Bourne, who would be the heroine and demigoddess of Lightning Bug and would reappear in numerous novels, herself serving as narrator of the classic The Chairing of the Trees.
From the beginning, she was set apart from the others by her beauty, her wit, her mystery, and her intense if unfulfilled sexuality. She was an enigma to her fellow Stay Morons, as Harington chose to call his citizenry, not insultingly but affectionately, in a play upon the town's invitational name and in recognition of the dictionary's definition of a "moron" as someone forever locked into the ages from 7 to 12, the years of most surprise and wonder and delight.
But until this novel, Enduring, we never learned what happened to Latha herself between those ages, or, for that matter, at many other stages of her mysterious life. Now, in his largest novel yet, Harington reveals her entire story from beginning to ... end?

Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers. His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for twenty-one years. His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published fourteen other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists. He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. In 2006, he was awarded the inaugural Oxford American award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).