It’s hard to know where to start reading Ron Rash. With family roots extending far back in the North Carolina mountains, Rash sees and hears his place with keen accuracy and weaves story lines you can’t stop following into the dark woods, hoping for light.
There’s much to admire in Rash’s 2004 novel “Saints at the River,” which begins with a graphic, oddly beautiful account of a young girl’s drowning in a wild, Upcountry South Carolina river…a river that by novel’s end is celebrated for its “vast and generous unremembering.”
Oconee County native Maggie Glenn, photographer for a Columbia, South Carolina, newspaper, is sent home to cover the aftermath of the drowning, which pits the victim’s grieving parents seeking the return of their daughter’s body, against environmentalists wanting to maintain the natural state of the river’s Wild and Scenic designation.
Maggie has her own sorrows to reckon with, as memories of her own family tragedies return, and her estranged father seeks forgiveness from the daughter he’s failed again and again.
“Saints at the River” was named the best book of the year by the Southeast Booksellers Association and received the Weatherford Award for Best Novel. It’s a novel you can’t stop reading, because the character-rich story—and Rash’s understated, beautiful prose—won’t let you.
The story above appears in our January/February 2020 issue.
