This copy of the UK edition has been SIGNED by Kaye Gibbons on the title page. Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction in 1988. "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." This opening sentence introduces Ellen Foster who, in the words of Walker Percy, "is a Southern Holden Caulfield, tougher perhaps, more solemn, as funny. Old Ellen she calls herself, and she is - an eleven-year-old ancient, an old soul, as much a part of the backwoods South as a Faulkner character - and a good deal more endearing."