In the tradition of William Gay's critically acclaimed novels Twilight and The Long Home, The Lost Country takes readers back to the south of the 1950s, a landscape populated with a colorful cast of scoundrels, accidental heroes, and ne'er-do-wells. William Gay's picaresque The Lost Country follows four people on the road: a young sailor hitchhiking to Tennessee from the West Coast, a one-armed con-man, a kid dodging the law, and an enigmatic young woman who has fled her sordid and abusive home life. Everybody's looking for something - redemption, revenge, a moment of grace - and their separate paths will eventually intersect in the town of Ackerman's Field, where these four disparate story lines will be inextricably drawn together. Another powerfully unsettling novel by the master of the Southern gothic, The Lost Country confirms William Gay's reputation as one of the most talented and prolific authors writing today - in the South and beyond. From the Author: I wanted to write a picaresque road novel with several disparate characters whose fates are ultimately intertwined when their separate stories draw together in my usual setting of Ackerman's Field. I was interested in the idea that places, whether physical or metaphorical, are hard to return to once you've left them.