In The Sweet By and By, five Southern women's lives come
together in an unlikely journey of courage, hope, and humor.
Even when faced with difficult choices and often fragile
memories, all five women must learn to reconcile their
respective pasts, find forgiveness, and relish in the joy of
life. Of course, this is no easy task: most of the novel is set
in a nursing home, where the sameness of each day creeps into
every page of the calendar. While Bernice and Margaret confront
their increasing loss of faculties, April and Rhonda struggle to
define what it means to live fully, and Lorraine finds her
identity in compassionate giving. Together, their stories quilt
together richly different experiences of aging, childhood, of
living and dying, and in so doing, challenge readers to examine
how time passes in their own lives, the people whose paths they
cross via chance or circumstance, and the impact of these
encounters on their own life stories. 1. The Sweet By and By is
told through the first-person perspectives