Robert Morgan

THIS ROCK

From the author of Gap Creek – an international best-seller and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award – comes the gripping story of two brothers struggling against each other and the confines of their mountain world in 1920s Appalachia.

The Powell brothers – Muir and Moody - are as different as Cain and Abel. Muir is innocent, a shy young man with big dreams. Moody, the older and wilder brother – embittered by the death of his father, by years of fighting with his mother, and by his jealousy of Muir’s place in the family – takes to moonshine and gambling and turns his anger on his brother. Muir escapes by wandering, making his way around the country in attempts to find something – a calling to match his ambition. When Muir, in a drunken vision, decides that his purpose in life is to build a stone church, the consequences of his plan are far-reaching and irrevocable. A community threatens to tear itself apart, men die, and his family is forever changed. All that’s left in the aftermath are the ghosts and the memories of a new man.

Robert Morgan, a native of the North Carolina mountains, was born in Hendersonville, and raised on land settled by his Welsh ancestors. He currently lives in Freeville, New York and teaches at Cornell University.

He has won numerous awards and honors including four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the James G. Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His book, The Truest Pleasure, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable.