Description
ISBN: 0871136104
Title: Water From The Well
Author: McLarey, Myra
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York
Publication Date: 1995
Edition: First Edition
Book Condition: F
D-j Condition: F
Synopsis: The rape of a young black woman in rural southwestern Arkansas of the 1920s, and the secret murder of the perpetrator, affects a diverse cast of characters for the next half century. 25,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo. Tour.
Myra McLarey’s stunning debut novel takes us into the overlapping, complicitous worlds of black and white, the strange, tangled tales that make up history and the soul of community, and the blessedness of life that lies beyond tragedy. Recalling the authentic cadences and gentle authority of Eudora Welty and the circular, magic storytelling of Toni Morrison, Water from the Well is a sensuous and compelling work of lasting literature.
Set in the leafy, agrarian environs of southwestern Arkansas, the novel opens in 1919 with a cow-pasture baseball game between the Sugars Spring men’s team and the coloreds of Bethel, an unheard-of event whose outcome disturbs the delicate racial and sexual balance of the community. A year to the day later a cyclone descends, its dark, destructive power visiting black and white alike. Tossing houses, uprooting rosebushes, and mingling lives, the storm becomes analogous to the swirling, evening-time porch stories that give substance to a world as fully realized as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin.
