Annunciation

"Ellen Gilchrist's debut novel expands the thematic and visual landscapes the author made indelibly hers in radiantly spun stories. The Annunciation follows the desires of Amanda McCamey: an unwed mother on a Mississippi Delta plantation at age fourteen, a wealthy New Orleans matron until her early forties, and now a divorced poetry student living in a university community in the Ozarks. When Amanda finds herself infatuated with an intense young musician, what at first appears to be a sexual intrigue becomes a grand and impossible passion that unfolds with striking parallels to the life of the eighteenth-century French poetess whose work she is translating."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Romance. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.