In this spate and mesmerizing debut, Christine Lincoln takes us inside the hearts and minds of African-Americans whose lives unfold against a vividly evoked Southern rural landscape. Original and profoundly affecting, Sap Rising announces the arrival of an important new voice in fiction. An abandoned seven-year-old girl living inside a fantasy of invisibility...a young woman weighing the life she's expected to want against the freedom that will transport her to the unexpected...a boy whose world is both expanded and contracted by stories he heats from a beautiful stranger - the characters who inhabit the collection are brought to life with a remarkably light touch and an extraordinary depth of insight and emotion.