Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!; Vintage Books, 1999

The story of Dena Nordstrom, a young TV interviewer and anchorwoman, moving from small-town Missouri to New York, is a funny and moving novel about the drama and values of everyday life in America. Sweeping from the gentler confines of late 1940s small town America to the tough side of the New York media circus in the '70s, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! mines golden seams of goodness and gritty determination, prejudice and despair, love and survival, in the story of a young TV interviewer, Dena Nordstrom, whose future looks full of promise, whose present is an emotional mess, and whose past is marked by mystery. With a cast of unforgettable characters, from the comic masterpiece that is Neighbour Dorothy (broadcasting home tips and good news to the midwest from her own front room) to the monstrosity that is Ira Wallace, TV network head - Fannie Flagg's novel is a funny, constantly surprising novel that keeps you guessing and turing the page right up to the last.