Ruin Creek - by David Payne (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

Set on North Carolina's windswept Outer Banks, Ruin Creek tells the story of the Madden family. May and Jimmy's reckless, incandescent teenage love has given way, a decade further on, to their son Joey's brokenhearted witness to the dissolution of their marriage and of a family bond he held stronger than time or death. Turning to his grandfather, Pa Tilley, Joey spends long summer days learning to fish the treacherous waters of Oregon Inlet, where North Carolina's mighty Albemarle outrushes into the Atlantic Ocean. One fateful afternoon, a moment's inattention at the boat ramp finds Joey surfacing fifteen yards astern, watching the shoreline recede as the current seizes in, his own name and the boom of the rollers the last thing he hears before the water fills his ears...

Review Quotes

"David Payne may not be the most publicized American novelist homing in on 40, but he is certainly the most gifted. "Ruin Creek" is full of life, full of wisdom, full of words that singe, sing and somehow console... a rare achievement." --The Boston Globe

"I begin with what may seem a bold observation: David Payne is the most gifted American novelist of his generation... "Ruin Creek" is the best new novel I've read this year. As in "Early from the Dance," he sets his literary table on the Carolina Outer Banks, a literary territory as palpable in these pages as Tobacco Road in Erskine Caldwell's works or the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck's." --The Dallas Morning News

"In his fine new novel, "Ruin Creek," [David Payne] writes of a people and a place from deep in his heart. Mr. Payne knows the hopes, fears and habits of his characters, and weaves a powerful, lyrical story for them that is a joy to read." --The New York Times Book Review

"[Payne] understands that place most families inhabit-somewhere between love and necessity, between truth and myth, between self and the expectations, the dreams and, ultimately, the separateness of others. "Ruin Creek" has an elegiac beauty. It celebrates the power of family love, even as it chronicles its dying... Writing this fine evokes a past time, but also a state of boyhood that is timeless." --The Washington Post Book World

"This is an extraordinary work, richly textured and painfully precise in its rendering of emotion. Stories this brilliant are told only by the masters of fiction, a short list to which the name of David Payne now belongs." --The Providence Journal

"A master stylist, Payne breathes life into his material, cloaking it in rich, evocative prose and deftly drawing us into his world until, suddenly, we realize that this is our family, these are our own tragic flaws... Payne has a rich knowledge of life." --Richmond Times-Dispatch