Berry Fleming

Waiting at the airport of a Caribbean island for his homeward bound plane, Edward Ray-the bookman of the title-reflects on this week, which has changed his life. First, there was the cargo ship voyage to San Juan de Pinos, a journey shared by an odd assortment of fellow passengers whose lives impinge on his own, and who entertain one another-in the manner of the travellers in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales with stories of their own unusual experiences....

Bob Otis, an unmarketable author who is just starting his own publishing company in order to get his latest novels in print, is abruptly sidetracked when a relative, so distant that Otis doesn't even place him, phones from Chicago with a request: his father, who has just died, wishes to be buried in the family plot in a small town in Georgia. This call leads to another wonderful comedy of manners as Otis, whose Southern sense of obligations won't...

This comic third novel in our Berry Fleming series centers on Lucinda, a local girl-makes-good, who returns on her psychoanalyst's suggestion to Fredricksville, Georgia, in order to "find herself." A successful author and playwright in New York City, she poses a distinct problem for the residents of The Homestead - a large, communal home left to any member of the Telfair family who wishes to stay - since all of the characters in her novels and plays...

This sprawling novel concerns the lives of two generations in one family; of their loves both licit and illicit, of their work, and of their personal triumphs and tragedies. It is a story, at first, about the three Woodruff brothers: Peter, a businessman, Leonard, an artist, and Ike, an attorney and member of Congress who risks his political career to prevent a lynching and bring justice to a black man falsely accused of murder. And it is about George...

They meet by chance on a Georgia road: William Wesley Johns, a middle-aged novelist with a manuscript to mail, and the girl with two fiddle cases who hitches a ride. In a lonesome spot the fan belt breaks, so Johns and the girl, Jo, who is as independent as a bird and as spontaneously musical, set out through the woods to find help. What they find instead is an absorbing adventure, a cast of backwoods people, and a strange journey down a haunting...

While Berry Fleming's interest in history has produced two books of non-fiction, one of which dealt with the Civil War (Autobiography of a City in Arms), The Affair at Honey Hill marks the first time he has used the Civil War as a setting for any of his novels. The story is presented through the eyes of Edwin Daws, a 56 year old Confederate soldier, from his present day (winter, 1864) awareness, as well as his memories, both recent and past. Assigned...