Long Home - Softcover

'Gay is a writer of remarkable talent... The Long Home promises to be one of the most discussed Southern debuts since Brown's Facing the Music in 1988.' The New York Times Book Review 'Just when it seemed that the superb writers of the US south could no longer surprise... along comes this astonishing, dark, offbeat novel possessing equal measures of weirdness and beauty... Gay's vivid prose and dramatic instinct create lasting images and human moments of genius. This is a far bigger book than many novels twice its size, and it deserves its place in a rich tradition.' Irish Times

In The Long Home, William Gay tells the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to an evil that is greater and closer at hand than any the boy can imagine - until, that is, he experiences it for himself. It is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live with that evil, who recognises that Nathan represents her only chance of escape. And it is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to act at the most crucial of moments. Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home brings to mind the greatest writers of the American South - Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, Cormac McCarthy - and haunts the reader with its sense of solitude, longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach.