From the publisher: Tommy Hays’ second novel, In the Family Way, won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award for 2000 and was chosen for the Book of the Month Club. Set in the early 1960’s in Greenville, South Carolina, it is about Jeru Lamb, a ten-year-old, who is trying to come to terms with his brother’s death. He’s also trying to understand his mother’s conversion to Christian Science, his father’s literary ambitions (and recent calling as “a Waffle House mystic”), the racial landscape of the segregated South, and a new classmate from the wrong side of town who claims to be his half-sister. “It was not lost on me that by expecting the worst every breathing moment, I backed into prophecy once in a while,” says Jeru, and when his mother finds herself “in the family way”–against doctor’s orders–Jeru is left to wonder just what he might lose next.