Waiting for April

On a stormy night in 1965, a man carrying a suitcase holding army discharge papers and a Bronze Star strode into the little town of Citrus, Florida, and changed everything. He called himself Sanders Collier and said he was the son of a prominent family of South Carolina gentry. He was handsome and cunning, and people believed him.

Within a few years he would be dead, shot in what would always be called a hunting accident. Who was hunting what was never clear to his son, left behind to make sense of a town split apart by the things his father had done. But when Roy grows into the spitting image of his father, the unspoken agreement to keep buried the old resentments about the past comes undone.

What follows for this family is the unraveling of every lie, half-truth, self-delusion, and wishful thought on which they had built their lives since the arrival of Sanders Collier. Only after the selfless sacrifice of one very odd, profane, saintly man does Roy finally understand what happened the night his father died.

Set in the lush, fertile world of the Florida panhandle, WAITING FOR APRIL is a complex, funny, sometimes dark story. When the Oxford American said Scott Morris's first book was a harbinger of even greater things, this is the book they were talking about.

Scott M. Morris is a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Oxford American, among others. He teaches at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, and is the author of the acclaimed debut novel The Total View of Taftly.