The Lost Saints of Tennessee

Book excerpt: “A riveting, hardscrabble book on the rough, hardscrabble south,” and the fault lines that can divide, test, and heal a family (Pat Conroy). This “powerful . . . Southern novel that stands with genre classics like The Prince of Tides and Bastard Out of Carolina” is driven by the soulful voices of Ezekiel Cooper and his mother, Lillian. Journeying across four decades, it follows Zeke’s evolution from anointed son in a Tennessee working-class family, to honorable sibling to unhinged middle-aged man (Bookpage). After Zeke loses his twin brother in a drowning and his wife to divorce, only ghosts remain in his hometown of Clayton. To escape his pain, Zeke puts his two treasured possessions—a childhood copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and his brother’s old dog—into his truck, and heads east. What he leaves behind are his young daughters and his estranged mother, stricken by guilt over old sins as she embraces the hope that her family isn’t beyond repair. What lies ahead is refuge with his sympathetic cousins in Virginia horse country, a promising romance, and unforeseen new challenges that lead Zeke to a crossroads. Now he must decide the fate of his family—either by clinging to the way life was or moving toward what life might be. With abundant charm, warmth, and authority, Amy Franklin Willis’s “honest prose rises from the heart” in this moving consideration of the ways grief can