Book Description

From Donald Ray Pollock, author of the highly acclaimed The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff, comes a dark, gritty, electrifying – and disturbingly funny – new novel that will solidify his place among the best contemporary American authors.It is 1917, in that sliver of borderland that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett is dead, and he leaves behind his three sons to eke out a hardscrabble life of their own: Cane (the eldest, handsome, intelligent), Cob (short, heavyset, a bit slow), and Chimney (the youngest, thin, ill-tempered). The brothers set out on horseback to pillage their way to wealth and infamy, inspired by a lurid dime-store novel that only one of them can read. But the heaven they’ve imagined may be worse than the hell they sought to escape.Several hundred miles away, in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his wife, Eula, and his son, Eddie. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family’s entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the now-infamous Jewett boys.In the gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy, and with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers collide and cleave together in increasingly dark and horrific ways. Filled with impure laughs and family dysfunction, The Heavenly Table places Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the American masters of rural mayhem and unlikely salvation.