Saturday, February 21, 2015

Congratulations are in Order!

Nancy Peacock, a fine North Carolina writer, has won first place for Mainstream Fiction in the 22nd annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for her novel, THE LIFE & TIMES OF PERSIMMON WILSON. (NancyPeacockBooks.com)

Peacock’s first novel, LIFE WITHOUT WATER, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and her second one got a stellar review in the New York Times Book Review, which noted Peacock’s “simple prose that possesses a rhythmic,
repetitive, almost biblical cadence.”

“I have been to hangings before, but never my own…”

PERSIMMON WILSON begins with this unforgettable sentence, “I have been to hangings before, but never my own…” He is a former slave who was secretly taught to read and write by a white woman. While he waits to be hanged for the murder of his former owner, he writes his story. It begins with slavery on a Louisiana sugar plantation where he falls in love with Chloe, a light-skinned house slave. Their owner takes her for his own sexual pleasure and Wilson is helpless to protect her. As the Union troops move through the South, plantation owners are packing up their slaves and animals and what possessions they can manage and heading for Texas. Chloe believes Persimmon is dead; Persimmon eventually joins the Comanches but looks for Chloe wherever he goes. When he finds her, she is passing for white and being put forward as their former master’s wife. To tell more would be to spoil the experience for new readers. Suffice it to say that this is a book well worth moving toward the head of your reading list.

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