About this ebook
An “impeccable” novel about race relations and responsibility set in the civil-rights-era South, by the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (The Atlantic Monthly).
In a small Georgia town, pharmacist J. S. Malone, diagnosed with leukemia, is given a mere year to live—and a lifetime’s worth of regret over years and opportunities wasted. Meanwhile, Judge Clane, still reeling from the suicide of his son, looks for meaning in the past and judgment in the present. Clane’s grandson, Jester, seeks identity in the wake of his father’s selfish act. And all three of them find their stories inexorably bound together as Sherman Pew, a young black man with blue eyes, looking to uncover the truth about his parentage, moves into a white neighborhood, thus upsetting the fragile balance of the town.
“One of the few first-rate novelists of our time,” Carson McCullers deftly weaves a story of life and death, love and hate, progress and stagnation, a brilliant examination of the universal human experiences that at once bind us together and tear us apart (Kirkus Reviews).
In a small Georgia town, pharmacist J. S. Malone, diagnosed with leukemia, is given a mere year to live—and a lifetime’s worth of regret over years and opportunities wasted. Meanwhile, Judge Clane, still reeling from the suicide of his son, looks for meaning in the past and judgment in the present. Clane’s grandson, Jester, seeks identity in the wake of his father’s selfish act. And all three of them find their stories inexorably bound together as Sherman Pew, a young black man with blue eyes, looking to uncover the truth about his parentage, moves into a white neighborhood, thus upsetting the fragile balance of the town.
“One of the few first-rate novelists of our time,” Carson McCullers deftly weaves a story of life and death, love and hate, progress and stagnation, a brilliant examination of the universal human experiences that at once bind us together and tear us apart (Kirkus Reviews).
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4.0
2 reviews
About the author
Carson McCullers (1917–1967) was the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Clock Without Hands. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917, she became a promising pianist and enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York when she was seventeen, but lacking money for tuition, she never attended classes. Instead, she studied writing at Columbia University, which ultimately led to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the novel that made her an overnight literary sensation. On September 29, 1967, at age fifty, she died in Nyack, New York, where she is buried.
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