A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation—laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath. If you love Jill McCorkle and Ron Rash, you do not want to miss Books Over Drinks with Tommy Hays! REVIEWS: “In The Marriage Bed, truths long hidden are revealed, not only in Asa, the grieving husband, but others affected by the tragedy at the novel’s center. All are fully human in their flaws and strengths, including characters a lesser writer would depict as mere stereotypes. The Marriage Bed is an exceptional novel—perfectly paced, riveting, unrelentingly honest and wise in its depiction of what William Faulkner called ‘the human heart in conflict with itself.’ A remarkable achievement.”—Ron Rash, author of Serena and The Caretaker “What a terrific novel this is. With scrupulous and warm honesty, it traces the intricacies of loyalty and betrayal in a long and loving marriage—and the shocks of life in a mortal body. A beautifully accurate book, with its own astute surprises.”—Joan Silber, author of Improvement, Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award “Tommy Hays has long been one of my favorite writers working today, and The Marriage Bed only deepens my love for his fiction. No one can tell the stories of old love and young love and the inherent complications of both as well as Hays, and there’s certainly no one who can tell them more poignantly.”—Wiley Cash, author of A Land More Kind Than Home and The Last Ballad “Tommy Hays draws you into his fictional worlds like no other writer I know. In The Marriage Bed, Hays’s most powerful novel yet, a freak accident shatters lives in all directions, exposing hidden fault lines. But the miracle of Hays’s writing lies not in his description of the disaster—though the description is heart-stopping—but in the way he unearths a longing for connection from its ruins. Tommy Hays looks at our world with all its sense of shame and betrayal and wild hope and shows us how to love it. The Marriage Bed is a triumph.”—Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tommy Hays is an acclaimed Southern writer, whose fiction grows out of his emotional connections to places he’s lived and known—Greenville, South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Atlanta. His novels are The Pleasure Was Mine (St. Martin’s Press 2005), In the Family Way (Random House, 1999), Sam’s Crossing (Atheneum 1992), and YA novel What I Came to Tell You (Egmont, USA 2013). He has published stories, profiles and book reviews in magazines, newspapers and literary journals such as Redbook, Our State, The Atlanta Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, Smoky Mountain Living, Still:The Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, and storySouth. The winner of many literary awards, he is founder and former Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program, UNC Asheville’s community writing program as well as Lecturer Emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program. ...
