Harris' novel tackles identity

TERAH Shelton Harris has steadily built a reputation for writing fiction that lingers in the emotional aftermath of damage rather than the spectacle of it, and in Where the Wildflowers Grow she turns her attention to a woman who has become so skilled at surviving that she no longer knows what living might require.

- LIESL VAN DER SCHYFF

Harris, whose earlier novels explored family fracture and belonging in the American South, once again situates her story in rural terrain, where isolation can be both refuge and trap, and where landscape carries the weight of memory.

The novel opens with Leigh, born Leandra Wilde, is being transported between prisons when the bus crashes, killing everyone onboard except her. Instead of leaning into the mechanics of escape or pursuit, Harris draws the camera inward, allowing the accident to serve less as spectacle and more as confirmation of what Leigh already knows about herself, which is that she is the one who remains when others do not. Survival, in her life, has never been heroic; it has been compulsory.

Believed dead, Leigh drifts until she finds herself at a flower farm in rural Alabama, a place that at first offers concealment and gradually becomes something more complicated.

Harris handles this transition with patience, allowing the physical routines of farm life to shape the emotional rhythm of the novel.