Nightwoods

A mother who is brutally murdered leaves her two children to her sister, setting up a violent confrontation with the children's father. Narrator Will Patton continues to prove himself miles ahead of the pack when it comes to portraying Southern lowlifes involved in high drama. Frazier describes the people and places of backwater North Carolina in the early 1960s with surgical precision, while Patton fills his delivery with pregnant pauses and a breathtaking pacing that transmits urgency and sadness. Patton performs these quirky characters on a collision course that is both spine-tingling and, at times, humorous. Frazier continues to produce work that is worthy of the praise heaped upon his earlier novels, COLD MOUNTAIN and THIRTEEN MOONS. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

September 19, 2011
National Book Award–recipient Frazier’s third novel (after Thirteen Moons) turns around Luce, a beautiful and lonely young woman who has retreated to a vast abandoned lodge in the mountains of Appalachia. Traumatized by negligent parents (“Mother a long-gone runaway. Father, a crazy-ass, violent lawman”), Luce now lives off the land in relative contentment—until her sister Lily is murdered, and Lily’s deeply damaged twins, Dolores and Frank, are sent to live with her. We are briefly allowed to hope for happily-ever-after when an old flame of Luce’s, a thoughtful and kind man by the name of Stubblefield, reenters her life, but he is not the only newcomer to town. Unbeknownst to Luce, her sister’s husband—and killer, Bud, on the prowl for money he believes Lily’s children stole from him, has arrived and will readily perform sudden, cold violence on anyone who stands in his way. Frazier’s characters lack nuance (they are either very, very good or very, very bad) and his prose is often self-consciously folksy. But his great strength, as well as presenting us with a fully realized physical backdrop, is the tenderness with which he renders the relationships at the core of this book, creating a compelling meditation on violence and the possibility that human love can heal even the deepest wound.