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WINNNER OF THE CROOK'S CORNER BOOK PRIZE 2016
'This is a great love story' Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story
Wendell Wilson, a taxidermist, and Frank Clifton, a veteran, meet after the Second World War. But, in this declining textile town in a southern US state, their love holds real danger. Severing nearly all ties with the rest of the world, they carve out a home for themselves on the outskirts of town. For decades, their routine of self-reliant domesticity – Wendell's cooking, Frank's care for a yard no one sees, and the vicarious drama of courtroom TV – seems to protect them.
But when Wendell finds Frank lying motionless outside at the age of eighty-three, their carefully crafted life together begins to unravel. As Frank's memory and physical strength deteriorate, Wendell struggles in vain to hold on to the man he once knew. Faced with giving care beyond his capacity, he must come to terms with the consequences of half a century in seclusion: the different lives they might have lived – and the impending, inexorable loss of the one they had.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Griffin's forceful debut novel examines the lives of two men who meet and fall in love in North Carolina shortly after the end of World War II. Wendell Wilson, a taxidermist, falls for war veteran Frank Clifton, and they live cautiously as a couple at a time when being outed as gay meant a prison sentence. They buy a house on the edge of town and rarely venture outside together, instead spending evenings in front of the television watching the broadcast of the local "Debbie Drowner" trial. Flashbacks illustrate their courtship and early years, and illuminate the difficulties in being forced to live a closeted life. They cannot even ask a stranger to take a photograph of them together as a couple. After Frank suffers a mild stroke and is subsequently diagnosed with a deteriorating heart condition, Wendell has to pretend to be his brother in order to visit him in hospital. As Frank's physical and mental health both begin to unravel, Wendell fights to keep their lives from falling apart. The novel's descriptive passages are too long at times, but Griffin manages to paint a compassionate portrait of a lifelong love that will linger with readers.
