The Marriage Bed - by Tommy Hays (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation - laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath. A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world. Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations - so much he didn't know or understand during his long marriage - he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive, and more important, rededicate himself to being a father"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation--laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath.

A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.

Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations--so much he didn't know or understand during his long marriage--he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive, and more important, rededicate himself to being a father.

Review Quotes

Spring 2026 Reading Pick, Deep South Magazine

"In The Marriage Bed, truths long hidden are revealed, not only in Asa, the grieving husband, but others affected by the tragedy at the novel's center. All are fully human in their flaws and strengths, including characters a lesser writer would depict as mere stereotypes. The Marriage Bed is an exceptional novel--perfectly paced, riveting, unrelentingly honest and wise in its depiction of what William Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself.' A remarkable achievement."--Ron Rash, author of Serena and The Caretaker

"What a terrific novel this is. With scrupulous and warm honesty, it traces the intricacies of loyalty and betrayal in a long and loving marriage--and the shocks of life in a mortal body. A beautifully accurate book, with its own astute surprises."--Joan Silber, author of Improvement, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

"Tommy Hays has long been one of my favorite writers working today, and The Marriage Bed only deepens my love for his fiction. No one can tell the stories of old love and young love and the inherent complications of both as well as Hays, and there's certainly no one who can tell them more poignantly."--Wiley Cash, author of A Land More Kind Than Home and The Last Ballad

"Tommy Hays draws you into his fictional worlds like no other writer I know. In The Marriage Bed, Hays's most powerful novel yet, a freak accident shatters lives in all directions, exposing hidden fault lines. But the miracle of Hays's writing lies not in his description of the disaster--though the description is heart-stopping--but in the way he unearths a longing for connection from its ruins. Tommy Hays looks at our world with all its sense of shame and betrayal and wild hope and shows us how to love it. The Marriage Bed is a triumph."--Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones

"Tommy Hays has crafted a thoughtful novel that takes on troubling matters with his characteristic warmth and wit. The Marriage Bed is both heart-rending and life-affirming and treats all its characters with TLC. And it's a page-turner, too! This story is quality fiction from a quality author, and a true pleasure to read."--Therese Fowler, author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

"Tommy Hays's beautiful novel slyly leads us down circular tunnels and interstices of a family's private life, where secrets lie waiting to erupt after tragedy hits. Asa Flowers has lost his wife in a freak accident and in his struggle to escape marital betrayal, personal failures, and misgivings as a parent, finds himself drifting down a kind of modern River Styx--where Asa's adult son and daughter--at turns fierce and tender in their own grief--intercept and steer their father and themselves back toward the light."--Jessica Keener, author of Strangers in Budapest

"Happy families are all alike--until misfortune strikes, things fall apart, and a story gets going. And what a story this is! Beautifully written, The Marriage Bed engages the reader's interest on every page as this once-happy family navigates toward a new order."--Josephine Humphreys, author of Rich in Love and Nowhere Else on Earth

About the Author

Tommy Hays is an acclaimed Southern writer, whose fiction grows out of his emotional connections to places he's lived and known--Greenville, South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Atlanta. His novels are The Pleasure Was Mine (St. Martin's Press 2005), In the Family Way (Random House, 1999), Sam's Crossing (Atheneum 1992), and YA novel What I Came to Tell You (Egmont, USA 2013). He has published stories, profiles and book reviews in magazines, newspapers and literary journals such as Redbook, Our State, The Atlanta Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, Smoky Mountain Living, Still: The Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, and storySouth.
The winner of many literary awards, he is founder and former Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program, UNC Asheville's community writing program as well as Lecturer Emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program. He is based in Asheville, NC.