The sound was not a car backfiring a tenant farmer named Lloyd Wilson had just been shot and killed, and what they heard was the gun that killed him. No one came to the pit through the field that lay alongside it, and they didn’t see anyone walking on the road. Or, they agreed, it could have been a car backfiring. One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot. I took this to be a literal statement of fact. It had no bottom, people said, and because I was very much interested in the idea that if you dug a hole straight down anywhere and kept on digging it would come out in China. The gravel pit was about a mile east of town, and the size of a small lake, and so deep that boys under sixteen were forbidden by their parents to “A truly extraordinary novel…Maxwell has tapped a vein of strange, pure emotion.” –Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday “He conjures depths of pain and regret in words of radiant simplicity.” – Anthony Quinn, Observerįirst published by Alfred Knopf Inc, 1980 “This calm, reflective and extraordinarily beautiful novel offers American fiction at its finest.” -Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
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