First published 2025
A Southern woman's orderly existence crumbles when a scarred war veteran enters her life, his damaged presence forcing her to confront what lies beneath her controlled facade. In another corner of the rural South, a preacher battles his own demons as his religious convictions buckle under personal contradictions and self-deception. O'Connor sets these stories in isolated farms and small towns where politeness conceals corruption and casual conversation masks underlying violence. Her characters discover painful gaps between their proclaimed beliefs and actual behavior when crisis strikes. Religious faith crashes against human weakness as ordinary people face moral tests that reveal uncomfortable truths about themselves and their neighbors. The collection follows moments when social pretense falls away, leaving characters to reckon with brutal realities they can no longer ignore. These encounters transform them permanently, stripping away the genteel surfaces of Southern life to expose what people truly are when pushed to their limits.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: crisis-of-faith, unreliable-narrator
Setting: American South
Period: 20th Century
304 pages · Paperback · Faber & Faber
Content warnings: violence