The Marrowbone Marble Company - Hardcover

Taylor, M. Glenn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007423284 ISBN 13: 9780007423286

Publisher: The Borough Press, 2011

Synopsis

A powerful novel of love and war, righteousness and redemption, and the triumph of the human spirit.

From the author of the critically-acclaimed The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart comes this sweeping novel of love and war, power and oppression, faith and deception, over the course of three defining American decades.

At the end of the Pacific War, where he has witnessed terrible things, Loyal Ledford is a lost man, disconnected from the present yet divorced from his dissolute, violent past. His life is set on a new course when he meets his cousins, Dimple and Wimpy, the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to him and it is there, with help from an unlikely bunch, that the Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged. Over the next two decades, the factory grounds become a vanguard of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, a home for those intent on change. Inevitably, such a home invites trouble, and Ledford must fight for his family.

Told in clear and powerful prose in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and John Irving, The Marrowbone Marble Company recounts the transformative journey of a man and his community, taking a harrowing look at the issues of race and class throughout the tumultuous 1950s and '60s. With this, his second novel, Glenn Taylor joins the ranks of the Great American Novelist.

About this title

Review:

“Taylor really is in that long American tradition that starts with Mark Twain and finds its character, meaning and moral force in the extraordinariness of ordinary people.” TIME OUT

“a mesmerizing storyteller...Taylor has created a remarkably complex, soulful, and provocative historical novel righteous in its perspective on America’s struggle to live up to its core beliefs.” BOOKLIST

“He writes with the elemental force of a latterday John Steinbeck." CANBERRA TIMES

“This novel confirms the view that he is a major and original talent.” SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

“Splendidly Norman Rockwell-ish...It’s like watching an idealistic old movie made in pre-McCarthy Hollywood.” THE TIMES

“Marrowbone throbs with muscular Hemingway sentences, consciously biblical cadences, a plethora of imagery where almost every mundane event holds a major and marvellous message.” WEEKEND HERALD

From the Back Cover:

1941. Loyal Ledford works the swing shift at the Mann Glass factory in Huntington, West Virginia. He courts Rachel, the boss's daughter, a company nurse with coal black hair. But when Pearl Harbor is attacked, Ledford, like so many young men of his time, sets his life on a new course.

Upon his return from service in the war, Ledford starts a family with Rachel but chafes under the authority at Mann Glass. He is a lost man, disconnected from the present and haunted by his violent past, until he meets his cousins the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to Ledford, and it is there that The Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged. Over the next two decades, the factory grounds become a vanguard of the civil rights movement and a home for those intent on change. Such a home inevitably invites trouble, and Ledford must fight for his family.

Returning to the West Virginia territory of his critically acclaimed novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, Glenn Taylor recounts the transformative journey of a man and his community.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Borough Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0007423284
• ISBN 13: 9780007423286
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384