Finalist for the National Book Award: Through the eyes of a precocious twelve-year-old in a seaside South Carolina town, the world of love, sex, friendship, and betrayal blossoms
Simons Everson Manigault is not a typical twelve-year-old boy in tiny Edisto, South Carolina, in the late 1960s. At the insistence of his challenging mother (known to local blacks as €œthe Duchess€Â), who believes her son to possess a capacity for genius, Simons immerses himself in great literature and becomes as literate and literary as any English professor.
When Taurus, a soft-spoken African American stranger, moves into the cabin recently vacated by the Manigaults€ longtime maid, a friendship forms. The lonely, excitable Simons and the quiet, thoughtful Taurus, who has appointed himself Simons€s guide in the ways of the grown-up world, bond over the course of a hot Southern summer.
But Taurus may be playing a larger role in the Manigaults€ life than he is willing to let on€"a suspicion that is confirmed when Simons€s absent father suddenly returns to the family fold. An evocative, thoughtful novel about growing up, written in language that sparkles and soars, Padgett Powell€s
Edisto is the first novel of one of the most important southern writers of the last quarter century.Â
