The Lost Country

William Gay's picaresque The Lost Country follows four people on the road: a young sailor hitchhiking to Tennessee from the West Coast, a one-armed con-man, a kid dodging the law, and an enigmatic young woman who has fled her sordid and abusive home life. Everybody's looking for something - redemption, revenge, a moment of grace - and their separate paths will eventually intersect in the town of Ackerman's Field, where these four disparate storylines will be inextricably drawn together.

Another powerfully unsettling novel by the master of the southern gothic, The Lost Country confirms William Gay's reputation as one of the most talented and prolific contemporary authors - in the south and beyond.


Genre: Literary Fiction

"William Gay's The Lost Country lands like a shimmering gift from the beyond. For those of us who cherish and honor Gay's tremendous talent, his bold method of seeing the waste and wonder we are, this posthumous novel is a reminder of what we miss: the language pitched toward the sublime, his men and women grappling for redemption in a world that has damned them, his understanding of grace in the presence of human badness. When Gay died too soon, we lost much, but The Lost Country gives a piece of him back to us." - William Giraldi