The New Inheritors - Hardcover

Wascom, Kent

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802128173 ISBN 13: 9780802128171

Publisher: Grove Press, 2018

Synopsis

Kent Wascom is one of the most exciting and ambitious emerging voices in American fiction. Envisaging a quartet of books telling the story of America through a single family and region, the Gulf Coast of the United States, Wascom began with his much-lauded debut, The Blood of Heaven, published when he was just twenty-six and praised as “stunning” by the Miami Herald, and “like the sermon of a revivalist preacher” by the Wall Street Journal. His second novel, Secessia, continues the story of the Woolsack family in Civil War New Orleans, and in The New Inheritors, he has written his most powerful and poignant novel yet.

In 1914, with the world on the brink of war, Isaac, a nature-loving artist whose past is mysterious to all, including himself, meets Kemper, a defiant heiress caught in the rivalry between her brothers. Kemper’s older brother Angel is hiding a terrible secret about his sexuality, and her younger brother Red possesses a capacity for violence that frightens even the members of his own brutal family. Together Isaac and Kemper build a refuge on their beloved, wild, Gulf Coast. But their paradise is short-lived; as the coast is rocked by the storms of summer, the country is gripped by the furor preceding World War I, and the Woolsack family’s rivalries come to a bloody head. From the breathtaking beauty of the Gulf to the bloody havoc wreaked by the United States in Latin America, The New Inheritors explores the beauty and burden of what is handed down to us all. At once a love story and a family drama, a novel of nature and a novel of war, The New Inheritors traces a family whose life is intimately tied to the Gulf, that most disputed, threatened, and haunted part of this country we call America.

About this title

About the Author

Kent Wascom’s first novel, The Blood of Heaven, was named a best book of the year by the Washington Post and NPR. It was shortlisted for the David J. Langum Sr. Prize for Historical Fiction and longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan Award for First Fiction. Wascom was awarded the 2012 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for Fiction. He lives in Louisiana.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It is coming in the warming water and the columns of the upper air. In the convergence of massed air and the tilting face of the sun. It is coming from the islands of the Cabo Verde west of Africa where the tradewinds, which once filled the sails of ships jammed with the captive and enslaved, make warlike commerce with other masses of air and form the beginnings of the storm. The hurricane, the god of the coast whose Passover is August and September, and which, before it was a god, was and remains a function of the earth’s need to temper summer, a colossal cooling mechanism. Around these giants the weight of the world shifts, the atmosphere thins to vacuum, and were you to stand at the right height in one’s eye you would be sucked skyward with the planet’s hot updraft and dissolved among the brilliant clouds to fall as particles of rain. It is coming for them in the summer that begins with arrows and ends with the beginning of the Great War. And it has no name. We can no more name the storm than we can hold the wind in our hands or know the nature of love.

Isaac knew from the moment he saw her, screened by a cut of smooth cordgrass waving in the wind off the bay, that she was the one from the portrait. The shoddy painting on the wall of the bedroom in the Woolsack house on Deer Island―the daughter, Kemper. It had been years since that day, but he remembered. They were not ten yards from one another, in opposite cuts of the marsh, where he’d spent the better part of the afternoon sketching ribbed mussels and a needlefish sought by a crane, and she, it seemed, was poaching a crab trap.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0802128173
• ISBN 13: 9780802128171
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240