The Adair County News, March 29, 1950

New Novel To Be On Sale April 1

Mrs. Janice Holt Giles, of Giles Ridge, near Knifley, has written a novel about the hill country of this section of Kentucky which is being published by the Westminster Press of Philadelphia. The title of the book is "The Enduring Hills."

Mrs. Giles book was selected by the Family Book Club as their "book-of-the-month" for May.

The setting of the book is Piney Ridge, a fictitious ridge in the country of Adair County. Mrs. Giles says it might be any one of a hundred such ridges that section, or a little of all of them. The characters and events are also fictitious, but they are drawn from the life of people whom she has come to know since moving to Giles Ridge. The book tells the story of a young ridge boy who loves the hills, but who feels a questioning and inner urge to get away. It takes him from his young manhood to maturity, through all his failures and frustrations to final success and happiness. . .a happiness which perhaps he had not expected to come the way it did.

Mrs. Giles spent most of her childhood in Oklahoma, where her parents were teachers to the Choctaw Indians. They moved to Arkansas later, and Mrs. Giles began her career in the field of religious education at Little Rock, Arkansas. She was a Director of Religious Education for a number of years, then she served the Arkansas-Louisiana Board of Missions as the director of children's work. She came to Kentucky in 1940 as the secretarial assistant to the dean of Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, a position she held until May of last year.

During the war she met Henry E. Giles, who was then in the armed forces and the conclusion of the war they were married. They continued to live in Louisville until 1949, when they bought a small farm on Giles Ridge and moved there. Mr. Giles also has had some success as a writer. The Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine will carry one of his short stories some time during the current year, and he is at present working on a novel.

Mrs. Giles second novel is also under contract by Westminster Press and is to be released in April of 1951, and she is presently at work on her third book.

"The Enduring Hills" will be on sale at Brown Drug Co., in Columbia about the first of April.