Fall Line - Hardcover

Starnes, Joe Samuel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1588382656 ISBN 13: 9781588382658

Publisher: NewSouth Books, 2011

Synopsis

December 1, 1955: Flood gates are poised to slam shut on a concrete dam straddling the Oogasula River, creating a lake that will submerge a forgotten crossroads and thousands of acres of woodlands in rural Georgia. The novel unfolds in one day’s action as viewed through the eyes of Elmer Blizzard, a troubled ex-deputy; Mrs. McNulty, a lonely widow who refuses to leave her doomed shack by the river; her loyal, aging dog, Percy; and a rapacious politician, State Senator Aubrey Terrell, for whom the new lake is named. A story of land grabs, loss, wounded families, bitterness, hypocrisy, violence and revenge in the changing South, Fall Line is populated by complex characters who want to do the right thing but don’t know how. Joe Samuel Starnes’s novel is a memorable, beautiful, and heartbreaking tale of a backwater hamlet’s damaged people and its transformed landscape.

About this title

About the Author

Joe Samuel Starnes is a native of Alabama who grew up in Georgia and has lived in New Jersey and Philadelphia for the past decade. His first novel, Calling, was published in 2005, and his journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and various magazines. He has also published essays, short stories, and poems in literary journals. A graduate of the University of Georgia and Rutgers University in Newark, he was awarded a fellowship to the 2006 Sewanee Writer's Conference. Starnes lives in Haddown Township, N.J., near Philadelphia.

Review

A quiet dazzler of a new novel ... Of all the contemporary Southern novels today that draw comparisons to Faulkner and O'Connor, Starnes' tale may be one of the few that deserves them. --Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Starnes has produced a novel worthy of attention, providing real insight into how the power of money and government contributed to the loss of the agrarian South ... Starnes knows his home area and its people and how to write about them with admirable authority and poetic understanding. – Jean W. Cash, Studies in American Culture, October 2012

Fall Line is an affectionate, eloquent story of loss and survival. --Teresa Weaver, Atlanta Magazine

A novel that accrues force the way a swollen river becomes a torrent...The town's fate is sealed on the book's first page, and in a tightly controlled, elegant narrative, Starnes's exacting novel brings us inside one rural community when the American South was about to burst and not one thing could hold back water or time. --TriQuartely Online

"If you liked Deliverance by James Dickey, you'll like Fall Line by Joe Samuel Starnes. The Oogasula is about to be dammed by the Georgia Power Company and to hell with the folks whose houses and graves are going to be flooded. Some people take the money. One of them takes the law into his own hands. This novel is vividly alive with people (and a great dog) and the river." --John Casey, author of Compass Rose and Spartina, winner of the National Book Award

Edition details

• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1588382656
• ISBN 13: 9781588382658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256