Buy this book with The Truest Pleasure by Robert Morgan today!

Buy Together Today: $27.57

A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) by Kaye Gibbons  (105)  $10.36

Drowning Ruth: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) by Christina Schwarz  (328)  $10.17

Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman

Black and Blue (Oprah's Book Club) by Anna Quindlen  (449)  $10.20

Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons  (304)  $9.56

› Explore similar items : Books (50)

Amazon.com
Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 2000: Robert Morgan's Gap Creek opens with one wrenching death and ends with another. In between, this novel of turn-of-the-century Appalachian life works in fire, flood, swindlers, sickness, and starvation--a truly biblical assortment of plagues, all visited on the sturdy shoulders of 17-year-old Julie Harmon. "Human life don't mean a thing in this world," she concludes. And who could blame her? "People could be born and they could suffer, and they could die, and it didn't mean a thing.... The world was exactly like it had been and would always be, going on about its business." For Julie, that business is hard physical labor. Fortunately, she's fully capable of working "like a man"--splitting and hauling wood, butchering hogs, rendering lard, planting crops, and taking care of the stock. Even when Julie meets and marries handsome young Hank Richards, there's no happily-ever-after in store. Nothing comes easy in Julie Harmon's world, and their first year together is no exception.

Throughout the novel, Morgan chronicles Julie's trials in prose of great dignity and clarity, capturing the rhythms of North Carolina speech by using only the subtlest of inflections. Clearly the author has done his research too--the descriptions of physical labor practically leap off the page. (Suffice to say, you'll learn far more about hog slaughtering than you ever dreamed of knowing.) Yet he resists the temptation to make his long-suffering characters into saints. Julie simmers with resentment at being her family's workhorse, and Hank flies into a helpless rage whenever he feels that his authority is questioned. In novels like The Truest Pleasure and The Hinterlands, Morgan proved his ability to create memorable heroines. In Gap Creek, he writes with great feeling--but not a touch of sentimentality--about a life Julie aptly calls "both simple and hard."

The New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner
Morgan is among the relatively few American writers who write about work knowledgeably, and as if it really matters. . . . You begin to feel, as you sometimes do when reading Cormac McCarthy's or Harry Crews' early novels, that the author has been typing with blood on his hands and a good deal of it has rubbed off onto your shirtsleeves. . . .his stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank William's best songs.

See all Editorial Reviews

First Sentence:
I know about Masenier because I was there. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
creesie greens, sweet taters, rendering lard, drunk man, canned stuff, wet sacks, hog killing Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Gap Creek, Preacher Gibbs, Timmy Gosnell, Painter Mountain, Caroline Glascock, George Poole, South Carolina, Flat Rock, Cold Friday, Holy Ghost, Jerrold James, North Carolina, Caesar's Head, Mount Olivet, Pleasant Hill New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover | Surprise Me!

Search Inside This Book: