Off For The Sweet Hereafter

In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?

The second installment in the Neely trilogy, which opens with a preposterously long sentence and goes downhill from there. Sex, gunplay, exhumed corpses. Something for everybody.

T. R. Pearson, author of last year's A Short History of a Small Place , again presents an intimate view of small-town North Carolina, but Neely is no Mayberry, and its residents remind one more of a Southern verison of The Beans of Egypt, Maine than of Andy Griffith. The Neely-ites are a motley crew, known by lineage and physical attributes ("the bald Jeeter"). Raeford Benton Lynch, of the Chickenhouse Lynches, never has done a great deal with himself, until he hires on with a grave-moving crew and meets hot-blooded Jane Elizabeth Firesheets, whose charms lead him to a life of crime. Pearson has a dense, folksy style all his own, and although his storyline sometimes gets muddled and his prose busy, his originality and unerring sense of place make this book a winner. --Ann H. Fisher, Library Journal.

Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, a young man must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and reoffending sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership. But when the Professor's past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men's relationship shifts. Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2021 A searing story about memory and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks In his late seventies and dying of cancer, famed Canadian-American documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders who fled to Canada to avoid Vietnam, has agreed to one final interview, determined to bare all his secrets and demythologize his mythologized life. But the story that unspools in front of the camera and an intimate chorus of observers, including Fife’s wife, his nurse, and his acolyte and former star student Malcolm Macleod, is confoundingly unexpected, the dark and affecting account of a man entirely unknown to all. A searing novel about memory, betrayal, love, and the faint grace note of redemption, Russell Banks’s Foregone is a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.

When fourteen children from the small town of Sam Dent are lost in a tragic accident, its citizens are confronted with one of life’s most difficult and disturbing questions: When the worst happens, whom do you blame, and how do you cope? Masterfully written, it is a large-hearted novel that brings to life a cast of unforgettable small-town characters and illuminates the mysteries and realities of love as well as grief. The Sweet Hereafter was released as a major motion picture by Atom Egoyan in 1997 and won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Egoyan also received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay that year.

Marvelously funny, bittersweet, and beautifully evocative, the original publication of A Short History of a Small Place announced the arrival of one of our great Southern voices. Although T. R. Pearson's Neely, North Carolina, doesn't appear on any map of the state, it has already earned a secure place on the literary landscape of the South. In this introduction to Neely, the young narrator, Louis Benfield, recounts the tragic last days of Miss Myra Angelique Pettigrew, a local spinster and former town belle who, after years of total seclusion, returns flamboyantly to public view-with her pet monkey, Mr. Britches. Here is a teeming human comedy inhabited by some of the most eccentric and endearing characters ever encountered in literature.