Cain's Version

Lindy Caton, middle-aged, attractive and recently divorced, accepts a position as Director of the Moulton Foundation in small-town Louisiana to be closer to her aging father. While building her new life, she encounters and assumes care of three elderly, eccentric women living in subsistence. As her relationship with them grows, she discovers the extraordinary secret of their past that sweeps her into the dramatic return of an itinerant son seeking to reconcile with his mother over an ancient act of cruelty.

2008 ForeWord Book of the Year Finalist for Literary Fiction

In his complex, mystical debut novel, Frank Durham concocts a post-Edenic yarn set in a small laid-back town in central Louisiana. Lindy Caton, 42, divorces her itinerant preacher husband who slept with men and gets herself involved with three half-crazy old ladies in Acheron—Seelah, Adhah and Uhwa— raising a truck garden. The old ladies tell vivid Bible stories, while Lindy mulls over the fate of her mother, Sunshine Caton, who took off with a neighbor years before. Turns out the eldest old woman, Uhwa, is actually the biblical Eve who arrived with her sisters after an epic flood to live in modern Acheron. The sisters were rescued from the deluge by Cain, who has wandered the earth yearning to make peace with his mother over slaying his brother, Abel. Durham draws parallels between Sunshine's reckless flight to Wyoming and Cain's roving that help to inform Lindy's quest to understand the past. Cain's sections, however (particularly his overwrought quest for his mother's pardon), are told in a stilted prose that slows the story's pace and compromises its accessibility in an otherwise inventive first novel. (Oct.)
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