Christopher Murphy

Abandoned in Wysteria: from the Author of a Sea of White Impatiens Christopher Murphy

It is 1990, and Wysteria, Florida, America's oldest and least credible spiritualist community, is celebrating its 100th birthday. Coordinating an anniversary festival is local resident and US Arts & Crafts magazine publisher Sheila Renault. Assisting Sheila is her cousin Van, US A&C's incompetent receptionist and Wysteria's reigning Virgin Queen; Erich Weimar, ex-con, divorced father and town hunk; his nephew Seth, a troubled 30-year-old in the body of an even more troubled adolescent; Justin Cook, whose parents bought the Wysteria Hotel so he could have some other place to lie around; Marilyn Smart, the community's most talented and most modest psychic; and Lenore LaShomb, its least talented and least modest. Together Sheila and her committee organize an event that makes Wysteria a household name-for very different reasons than they expect-and makes the upper-class residents of neighboring Talbot consider nuking it from orbit.