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Algonquin Books
March 2008
On Sale: March 4, 2008
336 pages ISBN: 156512569X EAN: 9781565125698 Hardcover
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Fiction
In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms,
both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura
McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's
Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and
frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two
young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie
McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband
is not—charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of
combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black
sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home
with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in
defense of his country, he is still considered less than a
man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of
these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to
its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family relate their versions of
events and we are drawn into their lives as they become
players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver
says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out
of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where
sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing.
They are with me still."
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