Jim Haughey in Conversation with Ron Rash

After their talk and a Q&A, Jim will be signing copies of his book.

About the Book

Eve of the Civil War, remote Appalachia, and hundreds of Irish laborers are clawing out a rail tunnel through the granite of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Blasting powder will kill some, rock falls will claim others, and drink, crime, and disease prey on the survivors in their squalid camp. Just convicted of murdering another laborer, young Michael Corvan is soon to be hanged.

When Jeremiah Sweeney, a world-weary priest, arrives to give Corvan his last rites, he stumbles on a secret too dark for the condemned man to confess. Will Sweeney and his assistant, Joe Donnelly, get past the miners’ code of silence?

Will they live to see justice done? Or will they ever leave the mountain alive?

About the Author

Jim Haughey teaches at Anderson University in Anderson, SC. Prior published work includes The First World War in Irish Poetry (Bucknell University Press, 2002) as well as essays on 20th-century Irish literature in publications like The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012). This is his first novel.

About the Conversation Partner

Ron Rash is the author of twenty books of poetry and fiction, including the PEN/Faulkner finalist and the New York Times bestselling novel Serena. His books have been translated into seventeen languages. He teaches at Western Carolina University.