The Mercy Seat
Elizabeth Winthrop
Maison d'édition: Grove Press
Synopsis
An incisive, meticulously crafted portrait of race, racism, and injustice in the Jim Crow era SouthThe novel is as intimate and agonizingly suspenseful as a stage drama with each character’s voice progressing the inevitable story forward from their own perspectiveIn her imagining the imprisonment of a young black man, Willie, for the supposed rape of a white woman, Winthrop skillfully covers all points of view of the community surrounding the event—from the young man’s parents, to the prosecuting DA, his wife and son, the town preacher, and the men who rousingly turn out for Willie’s execution Reminiscent in subject matter of novels such as Wash by Margaret Wrinkle, The Evening Road by Laird Hunt, In the Fall by Jeffrey Lent, as well as American classics To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer and the work of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’ConnorWill appeal to readers of sparsely written, time constrained works such as Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, Charles Baxter’s First Light, the works of Kent Haruf, Tim Gautreaux, and Michael Knight The Mercy Seat will be published in the UK by Sceptre, in Denmark by Politikens Forlag, in Holland by Hollands Diep, in Germany by Beck, in Lithuania by Baltos Lankos, and in Sweden by PolarisWinthrop has devoted fans in writers Andrew Solomon, Brad Watson, Christine Schutt and Anne Packer, among othersLike Rabih Alameddine, whom we relaunched with his fourth novel to huge acclaim and strong sales, Elizabeth has published previously (with Knopf and Simon and Schuster) and has moved to Grove to find a long term homeThe title is taken from a Nick Cave song, “The Mercy Seat”, which tells the story of a man about to be wrongly executed by electric chair. Jonny Cash famously covered the song in protest of capital punishment