'His prose style is all his own, often sensuously alert, evocative, graceful' Daily Telegraph
'There is no writer living who can play upon a scene the rich and Rembrandtesque flame that Faulkner commands' Evening Standard
In this feverishly beautiful novel, William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, she fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman.
From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit.
