Ruin Creek

With his first two novels, David Payne earned the rare combination of critical and commercial success, and established himself as one of our most gifted young novelists.
Now, in Ruin Creek, Payne travels deep into the soul of a troubled and unforgettable family and, along the way, establishes his rightful place in the legion of great Southern writers who know that we can neither escape nor recapture the past.
It is 1954 in Killdeer, North Carolina, and May Tilley, a beautiful young debutante, decides that she wants "a different life from what Mamma and Daddy had." She finds it, in spades, with Jimmy Madden, a former high school basketball hero with the dangerous combination of good looks, a smooth tongue and big, secret dreams.
Soon May finds herself pregnant, and after some serious soul-searching she and Jimmy decide to get married. But times are tough, as Jimmy enters medical school and struggles with his studies, while May adjusts to the strange new worlds of marriage and motherhood. Day-to-day life gets in the way of the couple's dreams, and they gradually realize that love and passion aren't always enough to preserve a failing marriage. Yet they stay together for more than a decade, and it is their son Joey who suffers the most as he watches his parents drift further apart. As he tries to cope with the devastation of his family life, Joey turns to his grandfather, Pa, for advice on how to move away from his troubled family and into the world of men - how to see his parents as they are, instead of how he desperately wants them to be.
Conscious at every moment of the bonds and burdens of family, David Payne has written Ruin Creek with the mature authority of a writer who knows the human heart in all its fragility and glory. No reader will come away from this novel unmoved.