Description

Discover this extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of America’s greatest novelists.

In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers – the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent’s misery – is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again. Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime’s regret.

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Publisher Review

One of the great books of our age. It is the subtlest of miniatures that contains our deepest sorrows and truths and love – all caught in a clear, simple style in perfect brushstrokes — Michael Ondjaate A truly extraordinary novel… Maxwell has tapped a vein of strange, pure emotion — Philip Hensher * Mail on Sunday * So magically deft at being profound…possesses that daunting quality impossible to emulate: it makes greatness seem simple — Richard Ford Maxwell does something all great novelists do: he conjures depths of pain and regret in words of radiant simplicity — Anthony Quinn * Observer * This calm, reflective and extraordinarily beautiful novel offers American fiction at its finest * Irish Times * Maxwell’s voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest — John Updike Maxwell is one of the past half-century’s unmistakably great novelists * Village Voice * Maxwell offers us scrupulously executed, moving landscapes of America’s twentieth century, and they do not fade * Times Literary Supplement *