Join New York Times bestselling author Ron Rash for a moderated discussion at the Kimberly Hampton Memorial Library (304 Biltmore Road, Easley, SC 29640) on Friday, October 6th, at 7pm. Ron will discuss his new book, The Caretaker and will be available afterwards for a book signing. This event is sponsored by the OPAL libraries (Oconee-Pickens-Anderson Libraries), and Fiction Addiction will be on-site for book sales.
There are two ticket options to this event. A $30 ticket admits one & includes a copy of The Caretaker. A $47 ticket admits two & includes 1 hardcover copy of The Caretaker + 1 paperback copy of In the Valley. We will have additional books for sale at the event.
If you are unable to attend, personalized copies can be purchased on our website.
Event tickets can be purchased online through Thursday, October 5th at 1pm. Tickets may be purchased at the door if still available, but buy ahead to guarantee your spot. Refunds can be requested up until the ticket cutoff.
Told against the backdrop of the Korean War as a small Appalachian town sends its sons to battle, The Caretaker by award-winning author Ron Rash (“One of the great American authors at work today”—The New York Times) is a breathtaking love story and a searing examination of the acts we seek to justify in the name of duty, family, honor, and love.
It’s 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery. It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Hampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob’s wife, Naomi, as well.
Sixteen-year-old Naomi Clarke is an outcast in Blowing Rock, an outsider, poor and uneducated, who works as a seasonal maid in the town’s most elegant hotel. When Naomi eloped with Jacob a few months after her arrival, the marriage scandalized the community, most of all his wealthy parents who disinherited him. Shunned by the townsfolk for their differences and equally fearful that Jacob may never come home, Blackburn and Naomi grow closer and closer until a shattering development derails numerous lives.
A tender examination of male friendship and rivalry as well as a riveting, page-turning novel of familial devotion, The Caretaker brilliantly depicts the human capacity for delusion and destruction all too often justified as acts of love.
About the Author:
Ron Rash is the author of the PEN/Faulkner finalist and New York Times bestselling novel Serena, in addition to the critically acclaimed novels The Risen, Above the Waterfall, The Cove, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; five collections of poems; and seven collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Nothing Gold Can Stay, a New York Times bestseller, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Three times the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, his books have been translated into seventeen languages. He teaches at Western Carolina University.