Liberating Paris: When an Old Flame Returns to Small-Town Arkansas and Changes a Perfect Life Forever

Liberating Paris: When an Old Flame Returns to Small-Town Arkansas and Changes a Perfect Life Forever

Woodrow McIlmore is leading the perfect life in Paris, Arkansas: married to his high school sweetheart, he has two wonderful children and a warm circle of family and friends. When Wood's daughter announces that she wants to marry a college classmate, Wood is stunned. But that's just the tip of the iceberg -- her intended is the son of the woman who left Wood twenty years earlier, the free-spirited Duff. And so begins a tumultuous year in Paris, as Duff returns and familiar sparks fly with her old flame. Their rekindled passion affects not only Wood and Duff but also their good friends, as they must now all decide what in their lives is worth keeping and what needs to be thrown away. “A splendid, often hilarious first novel...a thicket of sideplots give the novel a rich, layered feel. Poignant, welcoming and warmly funny, this is an irresistible page-turner.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A splendid, often hilarious first novel... Poignant, welcoming and warmly funny, this is an irresistible page-turner.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A seamless work of fiction…. It can stand with the very best of novels out of this strange country.” - Anne Rivers Siddons “Thomason takes up where Julia Sugarbaker left off, creating a range of quirky, colorful characters, endowing them with actual smarts... Thomason still has a way with women.” - Philadelphia Daily News “Liberating Paris gets high marks for being a paean to small-town America and its people, as well as a slash at the mega-stores that have made Main Streets into ghost towns... Characters have always been Thomason’s forte, and many of the characters in Paris are well drawn, even memorable... There is a poignancy in the book, as if Thomason had created something she longed for herself: good friends who are always there for you, and always will be.” - Indianapolis Star “If you miss hanging out with the Sugarbakers of TV’s Designing Women or Coach Wood Newton and his friends in Evening Shade, pull up a rocker and prepare to enter the new South of Liberating Paris... a cautionary comic novel about the social and cultural changes taking place across rural America today.” - Fort Myers (Fla.) News-Press Woodrow McIlmore is leading the perfect life in Paris, Arkansas: married to his high school sweetheart, he has two wonderful children and a warm circle of family and friends. When Wood's daughter announces that she wants to marry a college classmate, Wood is stunned. But that's just the tip of the iceberg -- her intended is the son of the woman who left Wood twenty years earlier, the free-spirited Duff. And so begins a tumultuous year in Paris, as Duff returns and familiar sparks fly with her old flame. Their rekindled passion affects not only Wood and Duff but also their good friends, as they must now all decide what in their lives is worth keeping and what needs to be thrown away. Linda Bloodworth Thomason, the acclaimed creator of Designing Women and Evening Shade , has written more than two hundred episodes for network television. She has been nominated for numerous Emmys and is the recipient of the Lucille Ball Award from Women in Film and the Eleanor Roosevelt Freedom of Speech Award. She is currently writing and directing her first feature film and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, director Harry Thomason. Liberating Paris A Novel By Linda Thomason HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright © 2005 Linda Thomason All right reserved. ISBN: 0060596732 Chapter One Imagine a town that hardly anyone has ever heard of. Yet everyonehas seen one like it. It is just before daylight and the MainStreet is coming into view. There are cracks in the sidewalk withstubborn little patches of grass sticking through them. Most of thestores are boarded up, but one that isn't has a lot of naked mannequinslying around in the window. A fall breeze comes up and blows someleaves lightly against the cracked glass pane, blows the stoplight whereno one is waiting, until it swings drunkenly from its cable. Just past all this, if you look hard, you will see the fire station andthe football stadium and then the interstate where something largeand pitifully ugly has been put up. Something to take the place of thetown. There is a fifty-yard banner stretched across the front of it thatsays: "Home of the new Fed-Mart Superstore." A few miles beyond that is a much smaller sign, really about thesize of a world atlas. It's nailed to a wooden gate, and you can tell byits shabby condition that it's been there a long time. The sign readsfast deer farm, but there aren't any deer around. Just a middle-agedman on a horse. He is wearing some red-checkered pajama bottomsand drinking whiskey from an upturned bottle and riding as fast as hecan toward the sun. If you lived around here, you would know thathis name is Woodrow Phineas McIlmore the Third. But most peoplecall him Wood, except his mother, who calls him Woodrow. Eventhough Wood and Sook -- tha