From a writer hailed as an American original — and the author of the
national bestsellers All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing — comes a taut, expansively imagined drama about four generations of an African
American family.The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the
1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his
grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that “true masonry is not held
together by cement but…by the warp of the world.” Out of the love that
binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs
who have forsaken — or dishonored — the family trade, Cormac McCarthy
has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction:
precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking
command of the art of storytelling.
