About This Book
It's 1950 in the small, western Georgia town of Crossroads. Eighteen-year-old LUDY PORTER is about to marry his sixteen-year-old sweetheart, CORRINE YARBROUGH. Both young people resonate with anticipation over their impending union. They are so much in love they can scarce bear to be apart. They are the perfect match, the perfect couple but they are not without their secrets. Corrine is already pregnant. She feels no remorse about this, though open knowledge of her condition would bring shame on her and her family. Instead, she wants this to be only the first of many children she bears for Ludy. She dreams of the life the two will build together, of the prospect of growing old together, happy and always in love. Ludy hides a secret he keeps even from Corrine. To share it would cost him this woman he loves, perhaps even his life. The only other person who knows this secret is CLIVE BARROW, Ludy's best friend since childhood, and the burden of that knowledge threatens to drive them apart. Coming Out of Winter follows the lives and love of Ludy and Corrine over a period of forty years, from meager beginnings, with only love to sustain them, through the wealth, power, and position they acquire in their small town, and into the eventual downfall and loss of everything they have, except their love for one another. And always in the background, always threatening, lurks Clive and the secret.
