A Painted House - Softcover

Grisham, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 034553204X ISBN 13: 9780345532046

Publisher: Anchor Books, 2012

Synopsis

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers--and two very dangerous men--came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke's world. A brutal murder leaves the town seething in gossip and suspicion. A beautiful young woman ignites forbidden passions. A fatherless baby is born. And someone has begun furtively painting the bare clapboards of the Chandler farmhouse, slowly, painstakingly, bathing the run-down structure in gleaming white. And as young Luke watches the world around him, he unravels secrets that could shatter lives--and change his family and his town forever.

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:

"Captivating . . . This is John Grisham's best work."--CNN

"John Grisham is about as good a storyteller as we've got. . . . The pages turn. The characters take on their own lives. And at times, as the cotton bolls glisten in the sun, you can't help thinking of other coming-of-age novels from the South: Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird."--The New York Times Book Review

"The kind of book you read slowly because you don't want it to end . . . Never let it be said this man doesn't know how to spin a good yarn."--Entertainment Weekly

"Characters that no reader will forget . . . prose as clean and strong as any Grisham has yet laid down . . . and a drop-dead evocation of a time and place that mark this novel as a classic slice of Americana."--Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 034553204X
• ISBN 13: 9780345532046
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 480