Description: In Christine Lincoln's literary debut, she gives us fiction -- compelling for its preternatural authority -- powerfully evoking people she has known and places she has been -- bedeviled and struggling young African-Americans, rural setting with their distinct rhythms. In the title story, "Sap Rising, " a woman must choose between a hopeless farmer who reminds her of her father and the call of the train whistle beckoning her to imaginary vistas. In "A Hook Will Sometimes Keep You, " a seven year-old child abandoned by her mother become in her own mind invisible ("Most people think when you turn invisible you get lighter, but just the opposite is true. It's more of a ledening, as if you're being pulled into the earth."), and finds consolation in a story about Wheat, a slave girl. In "Like Dove Wings, " we enter the mind of a pregnant young outcast ("every night I lie on a bed of grass covered earth, fall into a sleep with dreams more real than life, where I am a fish the colors of rainbows, a bird that soars to the depths of the ocean. They say when a woman is filled with life, she dreams strange dreams.")

By any account hers has been a nightmarish life redeemed only by her storytelling talent developed as a child at her grandmother's knees. At 4 she was sexually abused. By the time she was a teenager she had succumbed to drugs and alcohol, found herself pregnant and had an abortion with complications so severe as to convince her doctor that she would never have children. For nearly two decades she was an addict and a victim of spousal abuse. And yet: at age 34, she graduated from Washington College in Maryland with a perfect grade point average, winning the school's Sophie Kerr Prize and$54,000, awarded to the member of the graduating class showing the greatest literary promise. Christine Lincoln's is a magnificent story of overcoming the vicissitudes of life in extremis through dogged perseverance.

A deep reader of literary women as diverse as Toni Morrison and Sylvia Plath, Christine Lincoln has found her voice as a writer of startling originality; she is the real thing.

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