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Shop nowThe Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
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Learn moreNarrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new schoolteacher turns Threestep, Georgia, upside down. Miss Grace Spivey is a well-traveled young woman who believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad bazaar. Miss Spivey and her project transform the lives of everyone around her: Gladys’ older brother Force (with his movie-star looks), their pregnant sister May (a gifted storyteller herself), and especially the Cailiffs’ African American neighbor, young Theo Boykin, whose creative genius becomes the key to a colorful, hidden history of the South.
Populated by unforgettable characters—including three impressive camels—The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from a segregated schoolroom in Georgia to the banks of the Tigris—and back again—in an entrancing feat of storytelling.
Mary Helen Stefaniak is the prizewinning author of The Turk and My Mother and Self Storage and Other Stories. She lives in Omaha and Iowa City.
Robynn Rodriguez is a longtime member of the resident acting company of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In addition to her work at OSF, she has worked in theaters all over the United States and Europe. She lives in Ashland, Oregon, with her husband, Michael.
Reviews
“Stefaniak delivers a deeply engaging story from the heart of 1930s-era Threestep, Georgia, that manages to include stop offs in 1775 Baghdad and 1864 Savannah along the way…Full of intrigue.”
“A novel fairly brimming with inventive storytelling and comic brio.”
“A heartfelt, redemptive, and irresistible novel. Stefaniak knows that every story is many stories, and she handles the complex tales of romance, family, race relations, and secrets with intelligence, grace, and tenderness.”
“Wonderfully engaging…a great tribute to the power of education, strong women, and the fine art of storytelling…An intricate, dazzling pattern of history and imagination and truth.”
“Wonderfully seductive, one of those rare books you disappear into wholly. It’s joyous, shamelessly funny, heartbreaking, and page after page it gives you what you didn’t expect. This is a novel you’ll want to hand deliver to a friend.”
“This novel has strong, long legs. I hope it walks forever. Besides delivering suspenseful, eloquently detailed, nonsentimental prose, it spoons out a big dose of clarity that America needs.”
“Mary Helen Stefaniak is a born storyteller, with a fantastic gift for mingling the exotic and the ordinary, the comic and the heartrending. Her tale of drastic change coming to a small Southern town in the 1930s is filled with wild incidents, vivid characters, and a surprise at every turn—a delight to read.”
“Stefaniak sets the stage for likable narrator Gladys Cailiff, a smart, witty, and incisive eleven-year-old.”
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