The Best Novel I Ever Read

Written By: Stuart Ferguson - Shakespeare and Company | Issue: June 2023

“A perfect May morning in the Blue Ridge is something to celebrate [and] I was too happy almost to endure it…We were destitute and on the brink of disgrace, but I had never felt so rich in my life.”

When former Hudson librarian Mary Lou Worley stopped by the bookstore recently, I handed her the 2006 Refuge – where the above passage appears—and asked if she’d heard of it.

“It’s the best, best, best novel I’ve ever read,” Mary Lou declared.

Later, Shakespeare & Co.’s writer-in-residence Cathy Pickens popped in from upstairs, and I wondered if she knew the book’s author, Dot Jackson, a fellow South Carolinian.

(Dot spent a great deal of her life as a reporter for both the Charlotte Observer and the Greenville News, where she honed her marvelous writing skills before retiring to a 19th-century farmhouse near Table Rock State Park that was so decayed, she lived in an adjacent trailer – itself so decrepit that bears denned underneath its floor.)

“The first time I met Dot, at a small book festival she’d helped organize, she greeted me with that big smile as if we were long-time friends” Cathy related. “Dot then immediately ushered me off to meet other writers she knew I’d love—writers I still call friends.”

And I’ll never forget when Jackson came to the late, great, Cyrano’s Bookshop to sign Refuge. I met Dot at her car two blocks down Main Street and was surprised to see she was so crippled with a variety of age-related challenges that she walked with two canes. Or should I say flew: Dot bobbed down the street so fast I could barely keep up, and so cheerful and full of energy that her impairments soon faded from your consciousness.

She was about 74 then and lived another decade.

Refuge begins in the late spring of 1929, and is told in the scintillating-and-propulsive first person by Mary Seneca Steele Lamb (”Sen”) of Charleston, who grew up in the aristocratic South of Broad neighborhood. When Sen’s husband grows ever more abusive and profligate, she nabs his new Auburn Phaeton motorcar – bought with her money – and bundles their children off in the middle of the night, heading for her father’s people.

Refuge is laugh-out-loud funny, and fabulous in all that word’s meanings, and based on secret, true events in Dot’s own family. There are knife fights, thrilling escapes, romantic entanglements and a profound appreciation for the mountains and their folk. It was published with enthusiastic endorsements from Cassandra King Conroy and Ron Rash and won the Appalachian Book of the Year award. It will win your heart.