'Flannery O'Connor is my favourite American short story writer. These are proudly elegant stories of human stupidity, white privileges, rich with humour and what ails the human heart ' Claire Keegan





The American South. A turbulent world, fraught with the Civil Rights struggle and toxic religious tensions. Against the backdrop of mountainous sunsets and backwater shacks, deserted highways and small-town gas stations, people forge their own lives.





We encounter murderers, escaped convicts, dysfunctional families, conmen, fanatics, farmhands, Bible salesmen, troubled children, gangsters, hypocrites, misfits and outcasts. These are characters marked by grotesque flaws, darkly humorous and oddly beautiful. Their complex humanity is revealed in apocalyptic moments of Gothic horror, absurdity and violence that transform all who witness them - and us, too, as we realise that nothing in our moral universe is black and white.



Flannery O'Connor is the supreme tragicomic chronicler of these bodies and souls, her classic stories infused with the dazzling force of prophecy as one of the century's most visionary writers.



Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was born in Savannah, Georgia. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1947 and wrote her first novel, Wise Blood (1952) in New York After learning she was dying of lupus, she moved to live with her mother on their ancestral farm raising birds. In her lifetime, she published a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960) as well as an award-winning story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955); posthumously, her Complete Stories (1972) won the National Book Award.