Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
The Truest Pleasure - A Novel - cover

We are sorry! The publisher (or author) gave us the instruction to take down this book from our catalog. But please don't worry, you still have more than 500,000 other books you can enjoy!

The Truest Pleasure - A Novel

Robert Morgan

Publisher: Algonquin Books

  • 0
  • 2
  • 0

Summary

A “wondrous” novel of a marriage in the Appalachian Mountains, from the New York Times–bestselling author of Gap Creek (San Antonio Express-News).   Ginny and Tom have a lot in common—a love of the land, and fathers who fought in the Civil War. Tom’s father died, but Ginny’s father came back to western North Carolina to hold on to the farm and turn a profit. Ginny’s was a childhood of relative security, Tom’s one of landlessness. Truth be known—and they both know it—their marriage is mutually beneficial in purely practical terms. Tom wants land to call his own, and Ginny knows she can’t manage her aging father’s farm by herself.   But there is also mutual attraction, and a growing love as time passes. What keeps getting in the way of it, though, are their obsessions. Tom is a workaholic who hoards time and money. Ginny is obsessed by Pentecostal preaching. That she loses control of her dignity, that she speaks “in tongues,” that she is “saved,” seem to her a blessing and to Tom a disgrace. It’s not until Tom lies unconscious at the mercy of a disease for which the mountain doctor has no cure that Ginny’s truest pleasure comes into focus.   Named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, this novel by a winner of the Thomas Wolfe Prize is filled with “marvelously vivid imagery” and insight into the timeless truths of love and marriage (The New York Times Book Review).   “Morgan deeply understands these people and their world, and he writes about them with an authority usually associated with the great novelists of the last century . . . The book is astonishing.” —The Boston Book Review   “Simple, eloquent language . . . Pulses with poetry.” —The Washington Post Book World
Available since: 01/09/1998.
Print length: 380 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • Catriona - cover

    Catriona

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Catriona is a stirring tale of love, danger, and political intrigue set amidst the stately grandeur of old Edinburgh. David Balfour is an orphaned young gentleman who has recently managed to claim his inheritance from a miserly (and murderous) uncle. Now he and his friends James Stewart and Alan Breck are implicated in a sensational killing, and David must fight to clear their names. In the process he meets the beautiful and daring Catriona MacGregor Drummond and finds that nothing will ever be the same again.Interwoven with real-life people and events, and filled with atmospheric and evocative descriptions of old Edinburgh, this sequel to the immensely popular Kidnapped was considered by Robert Louis Stevenson to be one of his best works.
    Show book
  • Voice Of The Falconer - A Novel Of Renaissance Italy - cover

    Voice Of The Falconer - A Novel...

    David Blixt

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    From international bestselling author David Blixt (The Master Of Verona, What Girls Are Good For), a thrilling novel of Renaissance intrigue! 
    Italy, 1325. Eight years after the tumultuous events of The Master Of Verona, Pietro Alighieri is living in exile in Ravenna, grieving the loss of his famous poetic father by studying law. Secretly, Pietro is also raising Cesco, bastard heir to Verona's prince, the magnificent Cangrande della Scala. When word of Cangrande's sudden death reaches their sleepy seaside town, Pietro must abandon his studies to race north before rivals can usurp Cesco's rightful place on Verona's throne. 
    But young Cesco refuses to be anyone's pawn. Headstrong, willful, and devious, he defies even the stars, risking his life to display his mercurial wit to the city he's meant to rule. Meanwhile, far behind the scenes, a mastermind pulls the strings, moving all the players towards a bloody finale.  
    Born from Shakespeare's Italian plays, the poetry of Dante, and the events of history, Voice Of The Falconer explores the danger, deceit, and deviltry of early Renaissance Italy, and the terrible choices one must make just to stay alive. Filled with swashbuckling adventure and unrequited love, this epic journey recalls the best of Bernard Cornwell, Sharon Kay Penman, and Dorothy Dunnett. 
    "New readers, beware! Once you start reading one of David's books, real life comes to a screeching halt until you finish it." - Sharon Kay Penman, The Sunne In Splendour
    Show book
  • Twenty Years After - cover

    Twenty Years After

    Alexandre Dumas

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, is a supreme creation of suspense and heroic adventure.
    
    Two decades have passed since the musketeers triumphed over Cardinal Richelieu and Milady. Time has weakened their resolve, and dispersed their loyalties. But treasons and strategems still cry out for justice: civil war endangers the throne of France, while in England Cromwell threatens to send Charles I to the scaffold. Dumas brings his immortal quartet out of retirement to cross swords with time, the malevolence of men, and the forces of history. But their greatest test is a titanic struggle with the son of Milady, who wears the face of Evil.An Author's Republic audio production.
    Show book
  • Separate Peace - cover

    Separate Peace

    John Knowles

    • 0
    • 1
    • 0
    An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to the second world war.  Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.  A bestseller for more than thirty years, A Separate Peace is John Knowles’s crowning achievement and an undisputed American classic.
    Show book
  • Mercy Will Follow Me - cover

    Mercy Will Follow Me

    Sarah Hanks

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Natassa seems to have it all - a devoted husband with a good income, beautiful children, a faithful best friend - but it only takes one night for her world to crumble, catapulting her into a journey of trauma and healing, old pressures, and new friendships. Will she learn to stand her ground, or will she always live in someone else’s shadow?  
    DeAndre longs to break free from the neighborhood that keeps dragging him down, but the streets are made of quicksand. Dreams can hardly take flight there, even if he paints them wings. And when he does the unthinkable, could mercy ever be a possibility?  
    In the 1800s, a mulatto enslaved girl is torn from her mother and left to figure out who she is on her own. Through her time as a house slave in Tennessee and Kentucky, Mercy grapples with her deep ache for her mama, and her understanding of black and white. Which is more important to her? Freedom or loyalty? 
    Show book
  • The Mill on the Floss - cover

    The Mill on the Floss

    George Eliot, (Mary Ann Evans)

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    "The Mill on the Floss," published in 1860, is a novel by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). It is a poignant portrayal of Victorian England and captures the complexities of family dynamics, societal expectations, and personal aspirations. The story centers on Maggie Tulliver, a passionate and intelligent woman struggling to satisfy her emotional needs in the rigid provincial community of St. Ogg's. Her relationship with her brother, Tom, and their conflicts with family and society form the crux of the narrative. The novel explores themes of gender norms, education, and the tension between individual desires and social conventions.
    Show book