Set in the fictional North Carolina mountain town of Old Buckram, The Barrowfields is a stunning debut novel rich in character and place, steeped in literature and music, and fraught with family drama. Raised in an old mountaintop mansion by his eccentric book collector/unpublished writer/lawyer father and supportive but overwhelmed mother, Henry Aster Jr. narrates the story from his perspective as a new lawyer. He left Old Buckram for college in Connecticut and law school in Chapel Hill, but could never quite shake his father's influence.
Impressing his young son, Henry Sr. would glibly quote favorite passages from Poe, Wolfe, Camus, Styron and many others from his 10,000-volume library. So when he walked out on his family and never returned, Henry Jr. was devastated. Comfort comes hard to Henry, who consumes alcohol with abandon as his father did. Spinning his wheels as a lawyer with no particular alternative, he returns to the "moribund town of no earthly consequence in the persistent autumn of its bleak existence," to the abandoned Old Buckram mansion to confront the ghost of his father and seek relief from the "hateful bitterness inside me... from my inability to understand him and his indifference to my inability to understand him."
Born in the Carolina Appalachians and now a litigator in Charlotte, Phillip Lewis knows the idiosyncrasies of small mountain towns. With clear echoes of Poe and Wolfe, The Barrowfields examines Henry's difficult relationship with his father--a frayed bond that he finally accepts with the understanding that Henry Sr. "was only a man, who... had dreams that exceeded him." Lewis has put Old Buckram firmly on the map. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.