Familiar Ground

A man haunted by the death of his brother and a forty-year-old secret returns to his Tennessee hometown in this novel by the author of “A Question of Mercy.”

A novel of homecoming, loss, and the power of story, “Familiar Ground” follows the return of Jacob Bechner to rural Sweetwater, Tennessee, summoned by Callie, a dying woman nearly one hundred years old. Jacob aims to confront a moment of violence from forty years in his past that cost him the life of his brother Drue. Elizabeth Cox's debut novel, first published in 1984, is about the recurrence of loss in our lives and of the intractability of guilt that must give way for any measure of self-forgiveness.

The novel introduces us to a memorable collection of southern characters. There is the indomitable Callie, who has suffered rape and ostracism from the locals; Soldier, a mentally handicapped man lost in his loneliness; Jacob's alcoholic father and gentle mother; his great-niece and-nephew, whom have already known terrible loss in their young lives; and Jacob's steadfast wife, Molly, whose understanding of her husband is upended by the revelations of his past. With sparse prose and an authentic southern landscape and cast, Cox delivered an impressive first novel, the merits of which still hold up three decades later.