Winner, Walter Williams Major Work Award, Missouri Writers Guild, 2018.
This novel jumps ahead twenty years from the end of This Old World, though it retains the same setting--a valley of the St. Francis River in Madison County, Missouri. But things have changed in the community of Daybreak. A younger generation is on the rise, and old values are under strain. The communal, agrarian life that existed before the Civil War is disappearing as America falls under the sway of the Gilded Age, the Industrial Revolution, and the accelerated pace of life that portends the coming Twentieth Century. This novel takes on the growing rural/urban divide, the arrival of industrial methods to rural life, and the psychic cost of chasing that extra dollar of profit--themes as relevant today as they were in the 1880s.
Purchase this book
