O. Henry Award Winner First Novel! Shirley Sikes, a retired banking executive and former Board member of the Kansas Banking Association, knows about middle-America"s pressures firsthand. She lived through World War II and its aftermath. A successful businesswoman in her own right, the Sikes" small-town bank survived one rural crisis after another, as family after family lost their land held for generations. Sikes watched rural towns decline from being hubs of railroad, ranching, and farming activity to decaying, sleepy villages. Sikes" novel, Suns Go Down, looks at the relationships of one of these families, set in the 1950s era, whose existence has been threatened by unstoppable postwar change . . . a family whose enterprising ancestors had helped develop the small communities on the Western Prairie. The Lutz family, in Suns Go Down, was one of those family units with everything to lose as the postwar industrial wave began to swallow up their lives and their land.