Bloodline

Five Stories.

In these five stories one of America's most passionate and authoritative writers returns to the cane fields, sharecroppers' shacks, and decaying plantation houses of Louisiana, the terrain of his great novels 'A Gathering Of Old Men' and 'A Lesson Before Dying'. As rendered by Ernest J Gaines, this country becomes as familiar, and as haunted by cruelty, suffering and courage, as Ralph Ellison's Harlem or William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

Gaines introduces us to this world through the eyes of guileless children and wizened jailbirds, black tenants and white planters. He shows his characters eking out a living and making love, breaking apart and coming together. And on every page he captures the soul of a black community whose circumstances make even the slightest assertion of self-respect an act of majestic - and sometimes suicidal - heroism. 'Bloodline' is a miracle of storytelling.