The Truest Pleasure: A Novel

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