Gap Creek (Oprah's Book Club) - by Robert Morgan (Paperback)

About the Book

During their first year of marriage, Julie Harmon and Hank Richards move to Gap Creek, South Carolina, where a flood that nearly kills them tests the endurance of their relationship.

Book Synopsis

A New York Times Bestseller & Oprah's Book Club Pick

Young Julie Harmon works "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better.

But Julie and Hank's new life in the valley, in the last years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it's hard to tell what to fear most--the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters, drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap Creek a timeless story of a marriage.

From the Back Cover

GAP CREEK IS THE WORK OF A MASTER.--Fred Chappell

"Julie Harmon is like other strong mountain women created by Harriette Arnow, Lee Smith, and Wilma Dykeman; she survives poverty, flood and pain by mixing hard work with love. Perhaps because he is a poet, Morgan uses her voice in simple but luminous prose that tells the truth whether about the beauties of Appalachia or the human struggles during childbirth and death throes."--Doris Betts

"In examining the hard, honest lives of his people, Robert Morgan gives voice to a time and place rarely imagined. Gap Creek speaks of things both intimate and eternal."--Stewart O'Nan

"A starkly beautiful story of a strong young woman prevailing over natural disasters and tragedies, as well as cultural barriers, in the first year of her marriage in the last year of the century."--Loyal Jones

"Gap Creek is the work of a master. Robert Morgan knows every corner, every inch, of the way of life he portrays in this deeply affecting book. He has created one of the most admirable heroines in modern literature; I feel that I'll remember her always. Here is strength and grace and immeasurable courage: a triumph!"--Fred Chappell

Review Quotes

"His stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams's best songs."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Morgan . . . shows what it was like to be human in a time and place now far removed from modern America. He creates living, breathing souls who, as transparent as their dreams and fears may seem today, demand to be taken seriously."
--The Orlando Sentinel

"Gripping storytelling, indelible sense of time and place . . . Morgan turns the stories of prosaic lives into page-turners." --The Raleigh News and Observer