The End of California
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From critically acclaimed author Steve Yarbrough comes this riveting, beautifully nuanced, new novel of life in a small town.
After twenty-five years away and an illicit scandal in California, Dr. Pete Barrington is returning home to Loring, Mississippi, where football rules and religious piety mingles uncomfortably with darker human impulses. Though Barrington sets up a small practice and finds solace in an old friend, his wife, Angela, and daughter, Toni, are having trouble adjusting. Also, Barrington’s homecoming has awakened difficult memories for Alan DePoyster, a former high school classmate and now a pillar of the community, who blames Barrington for tearing apart his family. When DePoyster’s son and Barrington’s daughter begin a fledgling relationship, the children are forced to pay for their parents’ sins, and things take a disastrous, even shocking turn.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yarbrough returns to Loring, Miss. (setting of his acclaimed Prisoners of War and Visible Spirits), to examine the intersecting lives of two contemporary family men in this sensitive but powerful smalltown portrait of sex, religion and other human passions. Following an explosive sex scandal, successful physician Pete Barrington flees California, with wife Angela and their teenage daughter in tow, for the Southern town he left 25 years before. There he encounters Alan Depoyster, another native son, now managing a Piggly Wiggly and caring for a wife and teenager of his own. Alan, a devout Christian, holds a grudge from their high school days, when Alan's mother carried on an affair with Pete. Shortly thereafter, Alan's dad deserted them, and Pete escaped Loring on a Fresno State football scholarship. As circumstances bring the Barringtons and Depoysters closer, and evidence of Pete and Angela's continuing sexual indiscretions come to light, rage and jealousy lead Alan to shocking measures, setting up the book's suspenseful, shattering second half. Yarbrough gives each character in his slow-burning drama the complex emotional scars of broken marriage and, more importantly, the space and voice with which to explore them.
