From the Inside Flap
There is a most unusual woman living in Gap Creek.
Julie Harmon works hard, "hard as a man" they say,
so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop.
People depend on her. They need her to slaughter the hogs
and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to
do. She is just a teenager when her little brother dies in
her arms. That same year she marries Hank and moves down into
the valley where fire and visions visit themselves on her and
where con men and drunks come calling.
Julie and Hank discover that the modern world is complex,
grinding ever on without pause or concern for their hard
work. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep
chaos and madness at bay.
With Julie, Robert Morgan has brought to life one of the
most memorable women in modern American literature with the
same skill that led the Boston Book Review to say that he
writes "with an authority usually associated with the
great novelists of the last century."
In this novel, Morgan returns to the vivid world of the
Appalachian high country to follow Julie and Hank in their
new life on Gap Creek and their efforts to make sense of the
world in the last years of the nineteenth century. Scratching
out a life for themselves, always at risk of losing it all,
Julie and Hank don't know what to fear most--the floods or
the flesh-and-blood grifters who insinuate themselves into
their new lives.
Their struggles with nature, with work, with the changing
century, and with the disappointments and triumphs of
marriage make this a powerful follow-up to Morgan's acclaimed
novel, The Truest Pleasure.
