"Not since Flannery O'Connor has a fiction writer been brave and smart enough to confront us with these hellishly American spiritual issues. Yolnada Barnes is an immediately important author, and When It Burned To The Ground is essential reading." --David Huddle, author of The Story of a Million Years and La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl Inspired by the Los Angeles riots of 1992, When It Burned to the Ground is an impressionistic vision of inner-city life. This stunning re-rendering of Eden takes place on imaginary Piedmont Street-an avenue of vital contradictions, with a pawnshop and cemetery, prostitutes and preachers, a street with no money in its pockets. Here we meet a variety of women embattled at society's fringe-Cecile, once a schoolgirl at her history lessons of Pompeii, now a piano teacher down on her luck; Bernadette, seamstress and subject of rumor; an anonymous gardener planting dill as a curative against witchcraft and an amateur botanist studying the bird of paradise, which is both flame and woman's hat. Throughout this beautifully made montage appears the reluctant street preacher Daniel, bothering Piedmont with warnings of hellfire. As striking as Jean Toomer's Cane, When It Burned to the Ground is a stark, bold lyric of place and time, an ambitious and innovative fiction. Its stories, sketches and fragments culminate into a haunting book of novelistic breadth and depth, an extraordinary and unique accomplishment.