GENTLY USED - Peachtree Road by Anne Rivers Siddons (hardcover - no book jacket) 

Atlanta's own author writes about her city and its people during the mid twentieth century when the sleepy little southern town began the tumultuous transformation into an internationally flavored metropolis. Siddons describes Atlanta society through the words of her character, Charlie Gentry--"Money is the aristocracy in this town, no matter what you hear at the Driving Club. Money and property. It sure as hell isn't old families. None of us were here more than a hundred and fifty years ago."

Revolving around the ultimately tragic love/hate relationship of Shep Bondurant and his cousin Lucy Bondurant, Siddons dares to expose a Southern culture that psychologically killed or maimed its women and neglected and hid its blacks and thrust on its men rites of passage many had nor desire to fulfill.

Within the house on Peachtree Road in the heart of elite Buckhead, the secrets of the romantic southern culture found in Margaret Mitchell's Atlanta are exposed even as the larger American society forces immense changes on this culture.

PEACHTREE ROAD is the Atlanta novel of the twentieth Century as surely as GONE WITH THE WIND is the Atlanta novel of the nineteenth making this novel a "must read" for anyone visiting this city even as permanent visitors or fantasy visitors.