Synopsis
Hurricane Camille collided with two summer storms over Nelson County, Virginia, one night in 1969. Stories from that catastrophic rainfall still echo with tales of love lost, secrets buried, hopes awakened, evil averted. "One August Day" captures the unforgettable power and poignance of five of those stories. One ordinary hot, humid August morning, three women and two men in different parts of Virgina wake up and go about their business. By ten o'clock that night their lives, though as different and disconnected as five people can be, will be linked forever. Helen Jansky a middle-aged mother of three, seemingly trapped in a loveless marriage. Charlotte Fairchild is a mentally unstable elderly woman wandering in the past on her deceased father's farm. Judy Marsh another lonely woman abandons a safe single life in Richmond to join a lover in Lexington. Ex-con Clarence Winston is a migrant peach farmer and dangerous loner. Sixteen-year-old Daniel Alexander is a runaway trying to make a new life in Nelson County. As the muggy day unfolds, all these characters make unexpected choices and decisions that bring them closer to one another. Strangers connected only by loneliness and longing, these five adults, through chance circumstance and natural occurrence, become bound together forever in mystery.
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About the Author
Charlotte G. Morgan is the author of One August Day, Protecting Elvis, and numerous published short stories, including one selected for a prestigious Pushcart Prize. She was awarded a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University where she studied with literary giants Tom DeHaven, Paule Marshall, and Lee Smith. For over twenty-five summers she has served as Writer-In-Residence at Nimrod Hall Summer Arts Program in the mountains of Virginia, where she has been fortunate to work with authors Cathryn Hankla and Sheri Reynolds.
From Publishers Weekly
Like Marianne Wiggins (see above), Morgan has set her novel in a Virginia battered by a severe storm. On the night of August 19, 1969, the "tail-end" of Hurricane Camille dumped over 25 inches of rain within five hours on Nelson County. Of the more than 100 people who died in the torrential downpour, eight still remain unidentified. Building on these facts in her sturdy debut, short-story writer Morgan imagines the identities of those eight people, reconstructing the events of the final day of their lives. Helen Jansky impulsively decides she must take her children away from her emotionally abusive husband; elderly, delusional Charlotte is crotchety with her faithful "nigra" maid, Ora; ex-convict Clarence Winston alternates quoting the Bible with fantasies of "baptizing" women in a fashion the church would frown upon; Judy Marsh, burned once in love, prepares to leave town to be with the man of her dreams; and young Daniel Alexander looks for a haven from false criminal accusations and his domineering father. Interweaving her characters' stories in hour by hour segments, Morgan often furnishes background information at the expense of voice and atmosphere. Still, she builds suspense as the hurricane moves closer. Like Thornton Wilder's classic The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the narrative carries a sense of inevitability, and the reader's knowledge that a force of nature will determine the destiny of these people in its path makes the characters' lives more compelling than they otherwise might have been.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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