Provinces of Night

by William Gay

5 of 5 stars 1 rating • 1 review • 1 shelved
Book cover for Provinces of Night
Shelve It

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

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.
  • ISBN10 0385499272
  • ISBN13 9780385499279
  • Publish Date 26 December 2000 (first published 1 December 2000)
  • Publish Status Remaindered
  • Out of Print 12 November 2014
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Doubleday Books
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 293
  • Language English