Adam Jenrette, thirty-one and a successful Manhattan artist, has been hiding from his past for too long. When a relative's death calls him back to North Carolina, he is pulled into an intense encounter with his own eighteen-year-old self and the two most important people in his life-- Cary Kinlaw, his best boyhood friend, and Jane McCrae, the girl they both, disastrously, loved. And as he relives one incredible, heartbreaking summer from thirteen years before, he dares to recover what he changed his life to lose...

A Southern novel in the grand tradition, Early from the Dance is a spellbinding story, beautifully told, about characters who fix themselves indeliably in our memory and the kind of passion that transforms lives.