![]() ![]() They have fled Miriam’s husband, escaping the violence he has inflicted on her for years. The story opens with Miriam North and her daughters Joan and Mya arriving at the family home in Memphis, where Miriam’s sister August still lives. A family tree contains multitudes.īut what of the setting? Readers of Memphis will find no shortage there, either. We can’t know where this family is going to take us, but we know there will be complexity and depth. ![]() These names, each with their birth, marriage, and death dates, are spread before the reader like a map. Stringfellow’s debut novel Memphis opens with the North family tree, simply but beautifully designed. While a map might do all these things, I tend to favor a different introduction to a book’s world: a family tree. To them, the map represents the imaginative world built by the author, one full of complexities and depth and a setting so fully realized as to require its own geography. There are readers who claim that every great novel must have a map in the front. ![]()
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