List $29.98

Written & audio book performed by Katie Crouch - Unabridged Fiction - 6 COMPACT DISCS - 7.5 hours

Publisher, Hachette Audio (April 2008)

Booksense's #1 Pick for April

A Vanity Fair Hot Type Pick

“Wise, wry and heartbreaking.” —Publisher's Weekly

“Gentle humor and sharp observation couched in straightforward prose with none of the preening preciosity so often seen in Southern fiction.” —Kirkus

“There are more gasps, sobs, laughs and surprises in these pages than in most people's entire bookshelves. Love never felt so sharp or real as in Katie Crouch's debut.” —Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli

“Katie Crouch's hip and saucy debut is exquisite, the best kind of book out there: It seduces you into inhaling it while at the same time begging to be savored. Perfect for beach, bus or rehab.” —Karen Karbo, author of How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living From Kate the Great

“Girls in Trucks is an extraordinary first novel, one that I'm betting will win the hearts of every reader who has ever sought love or dodged it, and anyone who just plain likes to read a book that's savvy, funny-and-sad, wise, and beautifully written. Katie Crouch has the best ear for dialogue I've come across in years; and she knows how to tell a story that catches us up and spirits us into a world that's achingly familiar but full of surprises. Wow.” —Josephine Humphreys, author of Rich in Love and Nowhere Else on Earth

"Sarah Walters, the heroine of Katie Crouch's Girls in Trucks, is one of those people who never quite fits in—not with her Southern gothic family, not with her comically flawed lovers, not with her for-better-or-worse society sisters. The question is, at what cost? In spare, confident prose, Crouch perfectly captures the peculiar joys and pain of a life lived mostly alone. She is an author who knows the hunger, and resilience, of the human heart. She's also damn funny.” —Will Allison, author of What You Have Left

“It’s always exciting to hear a new voice – and Katie Crouch speaks in a funny, spiky, highly original voice that carries a reader happily along through this charming novel. Her “Camellia Girls” carry the sweet scent of Charleston, but they’ve got a lot more going on in their heads than most ladies of Southern fiction. I enjoyed this book from beginning to end.” —Mark Childress, author of One Mississippi and Crazy in Alabama

“In Girls in Trucks everything is cockeyed and wonderful--white-gloved drunks and stoned debutantes, the social rules of hot Charleston and icy New York. And at the center of it all Katie Crouch has brought us Sarah Walters, a devastatingly funny character trying to figure out not just how to manage the waltz, the cha-cha and various dances of heartbreak—but how to stay alive.” —Victoria Redel, author of Loverboy

Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks).

But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City. There, she and her fellow displaced Southern friends try to make sense of city sophistication, to understand how much of their training applies to real life, and how much to the strange and rarefied world they've left behind.

When life's complications become overwhelming, Sarah returns home to confront with matured eyes the motto "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia"- and to see how much fuller life can be, for good and for ill, among those who know you best.

Girls in Trucks introduces a narrative voice that is astonishing and irresistible - a true, sweet, and wise voice that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.

About the Author: I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, but now I live in San Francisco as a Southerner-in-exile. I've always wanted to be a writer, but was too scared to fully commit to it until my late twenties, when I stopped working in advertising and went to Columbia University to get my MFA. It took me five years to write Girls in Trucks. I wrote each chapter ten to twenty times. There are about eight chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor.

I mine my own life for material. My fiction is not totally autobiographical, because that would make for a pretty messy story, but emotionally I've lived almost everywhere my characters have been.

I learned an enormous amount about writing in college and graduate school, but mostly I learned how to express myself by reading the work of other great writers. I love the British Literature of the early twentieth century, particularly Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and E.M. Forster's Howard's End. I guess I'm a sucker for English manor life, or my fantasy of it, anyway.

Marguerite Duras's The Lover is my favorite love story. I admire many contemporary Southern writers, my favorite being Josephine Humphreys, the author of Rich in Love and Nowhere Else on Earth. I was fortunate enough to get to know her when I was in high school, because her son was my high school sweetheart. I've always admired her intelligence and grace, both on the page and off.

The last book that absolutely blew me away was James Coetze's Disgrace. I've read Susan Minot's novel Evening three times and each time have found some new beautiful nugget I missed before. Same goes for The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer. I was just given Uwem Akpan's debut book of stories about Africa, Say You're One Of Them. It's really not to be missed.

Finally, I read Joan Didion's essay, "Goodbye to All That" about once a month. It's my favorite piece of writing. She breaks my heart every time.