Peyton Place And Return To Peyton Place

Description for PEYTON PLACE AND RETURN TO PEYTON PLACE by Grace Metalious:

Beginning in Indian summer of 1936, PEYTON PLACE follows the contrasting parallel lives over the next several years of two fourteen-year-old girls: Selena Cross, too tough, too cynical, too damaged, from the wrong side of town, and Allison MacKenzie, too sweet, too trusting, middle class, with ambitions to become a writer. In the course of the novel, there is incest, murder, suicide, betrayal, adultery as people they trust are revealed in all their weak duplicity, as the fragile curtain of propriety is shredded and discarded, leaving their small, safe community Peyton Place exposed in all its sordid humanness. Fast-paced, with biting humor and a surprising sense of hope in the end, PEYTON PLACE may no longer shock, as it did in 1956, but it certainly still satisfies.

In 1959, the long-awaited sequel was published, RETURN TO PEYTON PLACE, which also features a large cast of characters as Allison, who has written a book about what really goes on is a small town, gets published, and how the people back home react to the thinly disguised portraits of themselves. Again, it is the characters, the themes of truth and deception, power, manipulation, sexual acceptance and denial, and the writer's remarkable narrative talents that kept RETURN TO PEYTON PLACE on bestseller lists week after week.