First published 1988
A gunshot shatters a winter morning on an Illinois farm in the 1920s. Lloyd Wilson lies dead. The murder destroys the fragile bond between two teenage boys: one comes from privilege but lives with neglect, the other struggles as a farm boy whose world has just collapsed. The killer is the father of Cletus, the farm boy who becomes an unwilling witness to the adult passions that led to violence. Fifty years pass. The privileged boy, now a man, cannot escape the pull of that terrible winter. He attempts to piece together what really happened, drawing on fractured memories and filling gaps with imagination. His reconstruction inevitably leads him back to Cletus, his lost friend who saw things no child should see. The narrator can only guess at what Cletus witnessed in those final months before the murder tore their lives apart. Maxwell weaves together childhood recollections and adult understanding to explore how the past refuses to stay buried, even as memory transforms truth into something else entirely.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: past-haunts-present, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Illinois
Period: 1920s, 1970s
135 pages · Hardcover · Secker & Warburg
Content warnings: child-death, murder, violence