The Lost Country - by William Gay (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the Navy, and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying.

On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D.L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are. Hounded at every turn by scams, vigilantes, grievous loss, and unspeakable violence, Edgewater navigates the long road home, searching for a place that may be nothing but memory.

Hailed as "a seemingly effortless storyteller" by the New York Times Book Review and "a writer of striking talent" by the Chicago Tribune, William Gay, with this long-awaited novel, secures his place alongside Faulkner, O'Connor, and McCarthy as one of the greatest novelists in the Southern Gothic tradition.

Review Quotes

William Gay's The Lost Country lands like a shimmering gift from the beyond. For those of us who cherish and honor Gay's tremendous talent, his bold method of seeing the waste and wonder we are, this posthumous novel is a reminder of what we miss: the language pitched toward the sublime, his men and women grappling for redemption in a world that has damned them, his understanding of grace in the presence of human badness. When Gay died too soon, we lost much, but The Lost Country gives a piece of him back to us.
-- William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark

Like so many fans of William Gay's work I've been waiting to read this seemingly mythical work, The Lost Country, for a quite some time. I still remember the feeling of admiration and awe I got when I read an early copy of his first novel, The Long Home, back in the late nineties and reading this new or lost novel you might call it gave me exactly the same feeling. Gay's elegiac prose sings once again as he breathes life into his characters and mines his patch of soil with the skill of the old masters. The Lost Country is the story of Billy Edgewater and his hard journey through a post World War II South filled with the downtrodden - hucksters, racists, drunks, bad or lost men and women all trying to make it in a harsh rural setting that is unforgiving yet beautiful. It's a helluva good ride and I can't wait to recommend it to readers.
-Cody Morrison, Square Books

The novel exposes us to a deliciously dark southern underbelly, one that, when paired with its sparse, lean prose and quiet intensity, becomes incredibly mesmerizing.
--The Next Best Book Club

Gay's great abilities in character building, richness of language and storytelling are on full display in this posthumous novel.
-Charles Frazier, author of Varina

Gay's midcentury Tennessee is a realm of bad weather and small-town lowlifes, vagrancy laws, and bootleg liquor; every man is a drunk, alternately listless and lustful and violent; every woman is defined by the use she makes (or once made, or will make) of her body. Yet there is humor in this bleakness, and it bubbles up from the same human springs as the cruelty and violence. ... Infidelities, prison breaks, murderous revenge, biblical language, and a deep kinship between the land and its inhabitants--Gay's novel is full-on Southern gothic and will delight fans of the genre.
-Kirkus Reviews