The Choiring of the Trees : A Novel - Softcover

Harington, Donald

4.2

632 ratings by Goodreads

9780156170994: The Choiring of the Trees : A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 015617099X ISBN 13: 9780156170994

Publisher: Harcourt, 1992

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A rape and a wrongful condemnation--a novel based on a true story. In Arkansas, 1914, a 13-year-old girl is raped in the backwoods of the Ozarks. On her testimony, a young mountaineer is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair. With his celebrated storyteller's art, Donald Harington has created a work rich in drama, passion, and texture, unforgettably bringing to life his characters, place, and era.

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About the Author:

Acclaimed by critics as "an undiscovered continent" and "America’s greatest un- known novelist" Donald Harington is a brilliant creator of fictional worlds, rooted in his native Arkansas. His imagination is no less expansive than Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his language is rich in a uniquely American, southern idiom. Winner of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, and the Heasley Prize, we’re delighted to be publishing With, his thirteenth novel, as well as three new editions of other novels in the Stay More cycle.

From Publishers Weekly:

As Nail Chism is led to the electric chair for the first time, he thinks he hears the trees singing in Stay More, his Ozarks hometown, a setting that Harington has used lovingly in his previous novels. But this book is a far cry from the larky irony of the anthropomorphic characters of The Cockroaches of Stay More . This is an intense, lyrical, moving story--based on fact--of an unjustly convicted criminal and the woman who saved his life. Harington makes of it a dramatic, engrossing narrative with the melodramatic pace of a cliffhanger, the tenderness of a pastoral romance, and the power of documentary-like descriptions of brutal prison conditions in Arkansas in the early 1900s. Falsely charged and convicted of raping a teenage girl, Chism is (temporarily) saved by a last-minute stay of execution. By that time, Viridis Monday, a newspaper artist covering the event, is convinced that he is innocent and begins a valiant campaign to gain his freedom. As usual, Harington renders his backwoods characters without patronizing or sentimentality, and he writes with sensitivity of the Ozarks life and landscape. Although sometimes the conceit of the singing trees becomes cloying, this is a significant novel that should please a wide audience.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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