Overview

"I love Ann McMan." Dorothy Allison, National Book Award finalist for Bastard Out of Carolina

When sculptor and author Barb Davis is given an NEA grant to pair original feminist sculptures with searing first-person essays on transitions in women's lives, she organizes a two week writing retreat with twelve of the best, brightest, and most notorious lesbian authors in the business. But in between regularly scheduled happy hours and writing sessions, the women enter a tournament bass fishing competition, receive life coaching from a wise-cracking fish named Phoebe, and uncover a subterranean world of secrets and desires that is as varied and elusive as the fish that swim the inland sea.

Set on the beautiful shores of Vermont's Lake Champlain, Backcast is richly populated with an expansive cast of endearing and outrageous characters who battle writer's block, quirky locals, personal demons, unexpected attractions, and even each other during their two-week residency. For Barb and each of her twelve writers, the stakes in this fast-moving story are high, but its emotional and romantic payoffs are slow and sweet.

Filled with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and breathtaking pathos, Backcast serves up a sometimes irreverent, sometimes sobering look at the hidden lives of women, and how they laugh, love, lose, and blunder through their own search for meaning.

Ann McMan is the author of five novels, including Jericho and Aftermath, and two short story collections. She has won two Golden Crown Literary Awards and her novel, Hoosier Daddy, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Listening Length: 10 hours and 59 minutes

Narrator: Christine Williams

About Ann McMan

Ann McMan is the author of twelve novels and two short story collections. She is a two-time Lambda Literary Award recipient, a six-time Independent Publisher (IPPY) medalist, a five-time winner of Golden Crown Literary Society Awards, and a laureate of the Alice B. Foundation for her outstanding body of work. A career graphic designer, Ann is also a five-time recipient of the Tee Corinne Award for Outstanding Cover Design, and a recipient of the Golden Crown Literary Society's Director's Award for her years of volunteer service to the organization.

Ann and her wife, Bywater Books Publisher Salem West, live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with their two dogs and an exhaustive supply of vacuum cleaner bags.