The Lost Country
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4.0 • 11 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Ten years after it was first announced, Dzanc is proud to deliver the lost novel from a master of the Southern Gothic—the work William Gay fans have anticipated for a decade.
Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the Navy, and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying.
On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D.L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are. Hounded at every turn by scams, vigilantes, grievous loss, and unspeakable violence, Edgewater navigates the long road home, searching for a place that may be nothing but memory.
Hailed as “a seemingly effortless storyteller” by the New York Times Book Review and “a writer of striking talent” by the Chicago Tribune, William Gay, with this long-awaited novel, secures his place alongside Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCarthy as one of the greatest novelists in the Southern Gothic tradition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gay (1941-2012) reaffirms his Southern Gothic virtuosity in this dark, brooding tale of worn-out poor folks in the small towns and backwoods of rural Tennessee in 1955. Billy Edgewater is a discharged Navy veteran hitchhiking home to see his dying father. Billy, however, is a hard luck case broke, aimless, and not interested in a family reunion. Once back in Tennessee, he falls in with Roosterfish, a one-armed con man who scams poor people, runs bootleg liquor, and is obsessed with revenge on thieving, cheating bully D.L. Harkness. Billy and Roosterfish's scams and constant drunkenness get them into scrapes with the law, bar patrons, angry husbands, lonely wives, and predators smarter and more ruthless than them. Billy continues to make bad decisions: he gets a girl pregnant, marries her, and settles into a married life he hates. Bootlegging and theft are more to his liking. When Roosterfish asks Billy to join him in a robbery and murder plot, Billy has one more bad decision to make. Gay's intense portrayal of the economic despair of 1950s rural Tennessee is authentic and gripping.
