Provinces of Night

It's 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman's Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he's been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won't be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he's an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.'s grandson, is pleased with the old man's homecoming, but Fleming's life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.

In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption-a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.


Author: William Gay
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 04/09/2002
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.49lbs
Size: 7.98h x 5.28w x 0.67d
ISBN13: 9780385499286
ISBN10: 0385499280
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Family Life | General
- Fiction | Cultural Heritage

About the Author
William Gay was the author of the novels The Long Home and Provinces of Night. His fiction appeared in Harper's and Atlantic Monthly, among others, and he won the William Peden Award and the James Michener Memorial Prize. He passed away in 2012.