Peyton is not ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone a barely remembered cousin who just rolled into town, a cousin who smokes cigarettes and drives a pink Thunderbird. However, her father seems to like Nora well enough, and she does make for good conversation at the Losers Club, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which raises Nora slightly in Peyton's esteem. Maybe she isn't so bad -- maybe Nora is just what quiet Lytton, Georgia,...

Anne Rivers Siddons is well-loved for her evocative and revealing portraits of Southern women coming into their own. In Heartbreak Hotel, she brings to the reader a young woman coming-of-age in the South of the 1950s-amid the racial revolution and the strife of a humid Alabama summer.