This comic third novel in our Berry Fleming series centers on Lucinda, a local girl-makes-good, who returns on her psychoanalyst’s suggestion to Fredricksville, Georgia, in order to “find herself.” A successful author and playwright in New York City, she poses a distinct problem for the residents of The Homestead—a large, communal home left to any member of the Telfair family who wishes to stay—since all of the characters in her novels and plays are based upon her relatives’ antics. And the members of the Telfair clan, for their part, prefer to keep their private comings and goings out of the public eye. Hustlers, hoteliers, swindlers and drunkards, bankers and bank robbers, madams and prostitutes, northern aristocrats and southern gentry, and plain old-fashioned working people are all in Lucinderella, enlivened by the deliciously satirical eye of one of the South’s most extraordinary novelists.
Berry Fleming was an American novelist. He is best known for his 1943 novel Colonel Effingham’s Raid. He was born in 1899 and died in 1989. Permanent Press reissued several novels in the 80s. He received a resurgence in popularity with the publication of his last novel, Captain Bennett’s Folly, in 1989 just months before his death. The work was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, among other publications, and since then many of his earlier neglected novels have been republished with more successful sales than during his lifetime.