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"Just before Henry Aster's birth, his father -- outsized literary ambition and pregnant wife in tow -- reluctantly returns to the small Appalachian town in which he was raised and installs his young family in an immense house of iron and glass perched high on the side of a mountain. There, Henry grows up under the writing desk of this fiercely brilliant man. But when tragedy tips his father toward a fearsome unraveling, what was once a young son's reverence is poisoned and Henry flees, not to re...

Joan Williams' third novel, a roman a clef of her relationship with William Faulkner, is the poignant and unusual story of the love between a world-famous writer and a young woman who comes to pay homage to him. Looking to novelist Jeffrey Almoner for advice and inspiration, inexperienced, naive Amy Howard writes him a letter full of all the pain and joy of her youth. The jaded author is moved to respond, and soon the two are meeting clandestinely, in bus stations and off Mississippi back roads,...