A funny, tender, and life-filled novel about family, aging, second chances, and the stubborn miracle of still being alive. Beverly Campbell-Hall returns to Larkspur, North Carolina, for her great-grandmother Colette Marks’s hundredth birthday expecting a quiet family gathering, a little cake, and the familiar ache of coming home after staying away too long. Colette has other plans. Nearly one hundred years old, widowed twice, opinionated beyond repair, and still very much in command from her old chair, Colette refuses to let her family turn her birthday into a rehearsal for grief. She wants chocolate cake, barbecue, music people can sin to, and the red dress she once wore when Pete Marks looked at her like he couldn’t believe his luck. As relatives, church ladies, old friends, children, neighbors, and half the town of Larkspur crowd into Colette’s house, Beverly finds herself pulled back into the messy abundance of family life: food, gossip, old wounds, laughter, church suppers, thank-you notes, peach cobbler, and the unfinished ache of her marriage to Alison, the ex-wife she never quite stopped loving. Set in a changing Piedmont tobacco town full of red clay, church kitchens, porch talk, old warehouses, new money, and women who know more than they say, Joy is a celebration of ordinary life at its loudest and most sacred. Colette is not dying for anybody’s convenience. She is still alive. And that turns out to be the most disruptive, hilarious, and holy thing of all.
