A novel of homecoming, loss, and the power of story, Familiar Ground follows the return of Jacob Bechner to rural Sweetwater, Tennessee, summoned by Callie, a dying woman nearly 100 years old. Elizabeth Cox's debut novel, first published in 1984, is about the recurrence of loss in our lives and of the intractability of guilt that must give way for any measure of self-forgiveness.

Elizabeth Cox is the author of several collections of poetry, short stories, and three other novels: The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love, Night Talk (winner of the Lillian Smith Award and a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), The Slow Moon, and A Question of Mercy (forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press). She has been recognized with the Robert Penn Warren Award and the North Carolina Fiction Award and inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Cox has taught creative writing at Duke University, University of Michigan, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Tufts University, Boston University, MIT, Bennington Writing Seminars, and most recently at Wofford College, where she shared the John Cobb Chair with her husband C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor for the Atlantic.