They would drive all night, and the father would sleep all Saturday. 'Every other weekend, they drove back to West Virginia. 'I know one family that moved to Chicago,' she is saying now. It pulls its children close yet cannot provide their most basic needs. Giardina's morality reaches far beyond her region (her next novel will be about theologian and Nazi-resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but at the center of her life is the tangled and entangling tragedy of this place, a beautiful land being flayed by strip mining. 'I think that's why I love this book so much, because she's dealing with big moral issues that I think a lot of contemporary fiction - not all of it, but much of it - fails to address.' 'She has a very strong moral sense,' Giardina's editor at Norton, Mary Cunnane, says of her. But as much as she is a writer of fiction, Giardina is a moral voice, a crusader born and nurtured on the stories that fill the hollows of Appalachia. Giardina is a certified novelist now, with her third novel, 'The Unquiet Earth,' out this spring, a teaching position at West Virginia State College lined up for this fall and a reading tonight at Chapters bookstore on K Street NW. Outside Appalachia, she feels misplaced, as if she has abandoned something that needs her. 'When I lived in Durham, I just felt guilty all the time,' she says. She has fled to Washington and Durham, N.C., but always beyond the mountains she collides with dismissive assumptions about the region where she was born 40 years ago. 'Whenever I leave it's because I feel I need distance, some perspective, because living here is hard in many ways,' she says. Appalachia, with its intimate green mountains, crumbling coal camps and unyielding poverty, is filled with the history and ghosts of her youth, and she can neither finally stay nor finally depart. She will be leaving this Appalachian town of 1,200 soon, the latest in a series of farewells to the mountains that began decades ago and will probably last her whole life.

The mountains and the fog close in around the town, and in the cloudy gray sky she imagines line after line of hills, as if the mountains went on forever and there were no world beyond. On days like this the coal dust coating the road mixes with the water and Route 15 goes slick as glass, but Denise Giardina loves this weather anyway. The fog hangs smoky on the mountains and the roads are dark with rain.

The Unquiet Earth by Denise Giardina