Description: Award-winning Florida novelist Patrick Smith's first novel, The River Is Home, revolves around a Mississippi family's struggle to cope with changes in their rural environment. Poor in material possessions, Skeeter's kinfolk are rich in their appreciation of their beautiful natural surroundings. The river on which they live--with its food supply, steamboats, and floods--figures strongly in their lives as the source of life, change, and death. Though their life is a simple one, it's filled with friendship, loyalty, love, and compassion.
Brief description: Patrick Smith (1927-2014) penned several novels about Florida, including The Beginning, Forever Island, Angel City, Allapattah, and A Land Remembered. His work was nominated seven times for the Pulitzer Prize and five times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 1999.