The first novel from one of America's most celebrated novelists, the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road. Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder-together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence-enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.