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978-0-9708972-1-3
0-9708972-1-9
$21.95 hardcover
6" x 9"
300 pages
Novello Festival Press
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Fire in the Rock
is a Southern novel par excellence--a marvelous creation. And it's also
the kind of book--nuanced, witty, perceptive--that makes you hope its
author has another book already on the way! --Josephine Humphreys
Joe Martin has
written a passionate and beautiful novel, filled with grand characters
and terrific stories. He knows everything about the South that Anne
Rivers Siddons and Terry Kay and Rick Bragg know, yet he also knows
those secret and subterranean things that Alice Walker and Dori Sanders
have been telling us for years. It has the smell of a classic....--Pat
Conroy
Fire in the Rock
tells us who we were and how we lived in the South in the 1950s and
'60s. It is photographically real, painfully, and, at times, comically
exact. The book is thrilling in its honesty, rich detail, memorable
voices. Those times breathe again, live again, and--make no
mistake--they are us. --Robert Morgan
Fire in the Rock
is the story of two young men, Bo Fisher and Pollo Templeton, white and
black, coming of age in the red dirt South of the 1950s. It’s
summertime, and they are sixteen, with free use of a pickup truck and
the constant company of a carefree, long-legged girl named Mae Maude
Snoddy. But this is also the heyday of Jim Crow, and what at first seems
an idyllic summer turns dark, violent, infected by the letter of the
law, the fear and small-mindedness of the times, and the weight of the
past kept hidden.
Ten years later, the ground
has changed again, and for Bo and Pollo to remain friends, they will
have to take their shared histories in hand, and come to terms with
events that continue to haunt them. A moving and thoughtful book, Fire
in the Rock is as much about how we see history as it is about a
particular time and place, and it’s filled with all the subtleties and
soft ground there is to be walked around the issues of race and human
nature.
about the author
Joe Martin, a South Carolina native, is a former English teacher turned
banker who holds a Ph.D. from Duke University. This is his first novel.
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