This book is about a New Yorker, Kob Hansen, whose parents were both born in Kentucky, though he had only visited as a child with his grandmother to bury them both after a tragic murder suicide. Yet, while teaching part-time at Columbia, he falls for a graduate student who is from Kentucky. They fall in love and decide to get married, and she talks him into returning to her hometown for the wedding and to live. There, things go awry as he learns about his own family and hers—his family poor Norwegian miners while hers rich Bluegrass elite.Meanwhile, Kob encounters a man known simply as Long Green, an old hermit who did twenty years for murder who, after his release, is shunned by the people of the county. The man he murdered thirty years before, Kob soon comes to believe to be his own grandfather, or so he thinks, until he begins to believe Long Green (Labe Cornett) may be his real grandfather.This changes his entire picture of his life and upbringing, all among the Southern culture and mindset of native Kentuckians.
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