Conveying a unique sense of history and place, Southern novelist Elizabeth Spencer ("The Salt Line; Light in the Piazza") tells of her youth in Carrollton, Mississippi, a time preserved in amber, then moves to Italy, Canada, and finally back "home" to North Carolina. Along the way, she recalls friendships with Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren, plus encounters with many others, including William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.