Can you imagine, or recall, your town in the 1940s and 50s? With small restaurants and without fast-food franchises - Bertha's Place instead of McDonalds? With tree-lined streets and a small downtown, without four-lane thoroughfares and strip-malls? With two-lane highways, without the Interstate? With radio, without television?

That's the world of the recently published novel, In the Heart of the Hills. Author Dwight Harshbarger takes the reader on a trip to the southern small-town world of a half-century ago. He describes the joys, heartaches, and challenges of a boy, Freddy Lemley, growing up in the small world of Kettle, West Virginia, a town that knows itself and its boundaries; one in which people have a sense of place.

Then things change. An abundance of overpowered automobiles lead to widened streets, a four-lane highway, and the Interstate. Trees and homes are destroyed, neighborhoods changed. The high school is closed. The social fabric of small town life, and Freddy's sense of place, is ripped.

Harshbarger, who grew up in the small town of Milton, West Virginia, says, "I didn't start out to do all that. I wrote a short story, Dominoes, now a chapter in the book. I wondered if I might write one more story, also told by Freddy. I did. And I learned that Freddy had lots of stories to tell. As he talked, I typed, edited. We produced twelve stories covering Freddy's life from ages 12 to 30, from WW II to the 1960 Kennedy-Humphrey presidential primary in West Virginia."

Marshall University professor, Joseph Wyatt, author of The Millennium Man, comments, "I've read 'hills' and it's wonderful. Anyone who came of age in small town, rural America will be put in touch with those days again… The book's style - individual short stories, woven into a fabric in which each episode touches upon the others - put me in mind of Mark Twain's travelogues, such as Roughing It. It is the book that one wants to read as dusk settles on a soft summer evening, lost in reverie about what once was, and why it is seldom found anymore."

Is the book an account of the author's life and Milton? "No," says Harshbarger. "Kettle is fiction. And Freddy is Freddy. I love him, but he's not me."

From WW II air raid drills to the arrival of the Interstate highway in the mid-1950s, the residents of Kettle and Freddy, age twelve in 1942, struggle to find their places in a changing country. Freddy describes the American experience through the prism of his little town as he grows to manhood and becomes a loving father. Readers who lived through those years will re-experience their joy, sadness, and challenges. Readers who arrived later will encounter a bygone way of life for the first time.

War-time stresses, post-war economic growth, racial injustice, religious revival, accidental death and suicide, the struggle of coal miners for safe conditions and decent wages, leave their marks on Freddy and the town. And through all of these events - as well as his friend's mad crush on a beauty queen, the local dominos tournament, sightings of a UFO and a celebrity - are woven the young hero's attempts to win the love of the girl of his dreams.