About this item
Highlights
- In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory.
- About the Author: Pam Durban is the author of All Set About with Fever Trees, The Laughing Place, and So Far Back.
- 184 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, General
Description
About the Book
In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory. This mesmerizing and disquieting novel recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow-era triple lynching in Aiken County, South Carolina. Through the interweaving of several characters voices, Durban produces a complex narrative in which each section reveals a different facet of the event. The Tree of Forgetfulness resurrects a troubled past and explores the individual and collective loyalties that led a community to choose silence over justice.Book Synopsis
In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory. This mesmerizing and disquieting novel recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow--era triple lynching in Aiken County, South Carolina. Through the interweaving of several characters' voices, Durban produces a complex narrative in which each section reveals a different facet of the event. The Tree of Forgetfulness resurrects a troubled past and explores the individual and collective loyalties that led a community to choose silence over justice.
Review Quotes
Praise for Pam Durban:
"Pam Durban renders her characters and their world with such rich and beautiful complexity that the only fair response to someone asking what it's about is to press the book into their hands and insist they read it." -- Tommy Hays, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A graceful, poignant, and ultimately satisfying story." -- Charles Sermon, The State
"Haunting and irresistible... Durban has written a splendid, engrossing, and, above all, deeply thoughtful novel that will linger in readers' minds long after they close its cover." -- Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Oxford American
"Durban's carefully managed cast of characters -- antebellum aristocrats, slave families and their descendants in the modern South -- are drawn with subtle grace, producing a narrative of compelling intensity." -- Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Pam Durban is the author of All Set About with Fever Trees, The Laughing Place, and So Far Back. Her stories and essays have been widely published, and her short story "Soon" was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina.