ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL - Workman Publishing

Robert Morgan
Gap Creek
A Novel
In 2000, Oprah Winfrey selected Algonquin’s hard cover edition of Gap Creek for
her Book Club. Now, a dozen years and more than one million copies later, we are
proud to offer our first paperback edition of this enduring bestseller.
Young Julie Harmon works “hard as a man,” they
say, so hard that at times she’s not sure she can stop.
People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and
nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to
do. At just seventeen she marries and moves down into the
valley of Gap Creek, where perhaps life will be better.
But Julie and Hank’s new life in the valley, in the last
years of the nineteenth century, is more complicated than
the couple ever imagined. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what to
fear most—the fires and floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters,
drunks, and busybodies who insinuate themselves into
their new life. To survive, they must find out whether love
can keep chaos and madness at bay. Their struggles with
nature, with work, with the changing century, and with the
disappointments and triumphs of their union make Gap
Creek a timeless story of a marriage.
“Morgan . . . shows what it was like to be human in a time and
place now far removed from modern America. He creates living,
breathing souls who, as transparent as their dreams and
fears may seem today, demand to be taken seriously.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
“His stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with
the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams’s best songs.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Gripping storytelling, indelible sense of time and place . . .
Morgan turns the stories of prosaic lives into page-turners.”
—The Raleigh News and Observer
Robert Morgan is the author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction,
most notably his novel Gap Creek, and Boone, his biography
of Daniel Boone, both of which were national bestsellers. The
recipient of an Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature,
he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in
2010. He lives in Ithaca, New York. Author website: www.robert
morgan.com.
August
Fiction
368 pages, 5 ½" x 8 ¼"
ISBN 978-1-61620-176-0
$14.95 Trade Paper
No. 73176
world
E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-178-4
HC ISBN 978-1-56512-296-3
• Reader’s Round Table edition
• Trade paper terms
• Includes teaser chapter
from The Road from Gap Creek
A l g o n q u i n P a p e r b a c k
The Truest Pleasure
ISBN 978-1-56512-222-2
No. 72222
Brave Enemies
ISBN 978-1-56512-578-0
No. 72578
Boone: A Biography
ISBN 978-1-56512-615-2
No. 72615
Algonquin Books Fall/Winter 2012 | 11