Its 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackermans Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, hes been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons wont be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but hes an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.s grandson, is pleased with the old mans homecoming, but Flemings life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemptiona whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis. From the Trade Paperback edition.