A Painted House: A gripping crime thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of mystery and suspense - Softcover

Grisham, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099537028 ISBN 13: 9780099537021

Publisher: Arrow, 2011

Synopsis

The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with two weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist high to my father, almost over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop."

In rural Arkansas, seven-year-old farm boy Luke Chandler lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.

For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and sometimes each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.

A Painted House is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to experience, drawn from the personal experience of legendary legal thriller author John Grisham.

About this title

Review:

In A Painted House, John Grisham is less concerned with tight plotting and legal shenanigans than with the roots of that country life which taught him much of what he knows about being human. In the early autumn of 1952, seven-year-old Luke Chandler is helping his family pick cotton on his grandfather's Arkansas farm; times are hard--Luke's uncle Ricky is off fighting in Korea and rent on the land, interest on crop loans, is due. Tension abounds--between the hillbilly Spruill family and the Mexican labourers who between them make up the farm's workforce; between the bully Hank Spruill and the Sisco family, one of whom he has killed in a fight; between the Chandlers and their neighbours the Larchers over Libby Larcher's baby--which she claims is Ricky's. This is a tight and yet achingly nostalgic book about growing up and moving on--the few months it covers are ones in which young Luke learns some important lessons about the way of the world, and his place in it. Grisham writes here with a sensitivity and sense of time and place which have not always been his most obvious virtues--it is a remarkable book. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"His best work" (The Times)

"A beguiling and gracefully constructed novel" (Sunday Times)

"Chararacters no reader will forget. And a drop-dead evocation of a time and a place that mark this novel as a classic" (Publishers Weekly)

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0099537028
• ISBN 13: 9780099537021
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480