Ruin Creek Book

In Ruin Creek, David Payne revisits North Carolina's Madden family.

Jimmy Madden, a fiercely independent high school basketball star with big dreams for his future, sees them dim one Fourth of July when his debutante girlfriend May Tilley tells him she is pregnant. Twelve years later, Jimmy grudgingly endures the workaday drudgery of his father-in-law's tobacco warehouse; May, equally dissatisfied, wonders if love alone can make, and save, a marriage. But it is young Joey who bears the brunt of his parents' unhappy union. As he struggles to cope with his fractured family life, Joey turns to his grandfather, who explains that "a time may come when a person has to let go of what he loves in order to save himself."

Set in 1950's North Carolina, rich with the windswept beauty of its Outer Banks, Ruin Creek is a major work by one of the most insightful students of family writing fiction in America today. Writing in the contrapuntal voices of Joey, May, and Jimmy, David Payne examines the early life of characters from Gravesend Light, creating a portrait of a family that breaks apart, heals, and endures.

"Full of life, full of wisdom, full of words that singe, sing, and somehow console." (The Boston Globe)

"Masterful.... Somewhere between Faulkner and Conroy." (The Denver Post)

Providence Journal

This is an extraordinary work, richly textured and painfully precise in its rendering of emotion. Stories this brilliant are told only by the masters of fiction, a short list to which the name of David Payne now belongs.