Billy Edgewater, discharged from the Navy and touched by a rising desperation, sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying. On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D.L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are.

Hounded at every turn by scams, vigilantes, grievous loss, and violence, Edgewater navigates the long road home, searching for a place that may be nothing more than memory.

Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as 'a seemingly effortless storyteller', with this novel William Gay once again shows why his work is often talked about alongside the great Southern novelists, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy.