Synopses & Reviews
She's had no education, and you can't call what her father's been trying to give her "love." So at seventeen, Fay Jones leaves home, carrying a purse with half a pack of cigarettes and two dollar bills. She's headed for the bright lights and big times of Biloxi, and even she knows she needs help getting there. But help's not hard to come by when you look like Fay.
There's a highway patrolman who gives her a lift, with a detour to his own place. There are truck drivers who pick her up, no questions asked. There's a crop duster with money for a night or two on the town. There's a strip-joint bouncer who deals on the side. And in the end, there are five dead bodies stacked in Fay's wake.
Fay is a novel that could only have been written by Larry Brown, whom the Boston Globe called "one of our finest writers -- honest, courageous, unflinching."
Review
"Larry Brown is a true original, and Fay is among his best works. Follow Fay past the kudzu-draped woods and cinderblock bars and sunburned fields of Brown's imagination. It's a journey you won't forget."
-- Polly Paddock Gossett, Chicago Tribune
Review
"[H]is most powerful novel yet...[B]y the end the reader is mesmerized, waiting for a gun to go off, but praying for a miracle. There are no miracles, of course, but the raw power of this novel, the clear, graphic accounts of both humble and perverted lives (in the bars and strip joints of Biloxi) is a triumph of realism and a humane imagination." Publishers Weekly
Review
"For years, Larry Brown has been known and respected as a writer's writer. But now, with Fay, this profoundly Southern novelist may win the broad readership he so richly deserves....Spellbinding." William Plummer, People
Review
Bill Nichols USA Today Brown will show you another America -- his America -- and dare you to try to forget it exists.
Review
Jean Charbonneau Denver Post A well-oiled machine...More ambitious than any of Brown's previous novels, Fay might just be his best work yet.
Synopsis
She's had no education, and you can't call what her father's been trying to give her "love." So at seventeen, Fay Jones leaves home, carrying a purse with half a pack of cigarettes and two dollar bills. She's headed for the bright lights and big times of Biloxi, and even she knows she needs help getting there. But help's not hard to come by when you look like Fay.
There's a highway patrolman who gives her a lift, with a detour to his own place. There are truck drivers who pick her up, no questions asked. There's a crop duster with money for a night or two on the town. There's a strip-joint bouncer who deals on the side. And in the end, there are five dead bodies stacked in Fay's wake.
Fay is a novel that could only have been written by Larry Brown, whom the Boston Globe called "one of our finest writers -- honest, courageous, unflinching."
Synopsis
A beautiful, naive, and good-hearted woman, 17-year-old Fay is fleeing home and her father's sexual advances, only to encounter a series of men all too willing to take care of her. As she makes her way from the woods just north of Oxford to the beaches of Biloxi, leaving bodies in her wake, Fay emerges as one of the most captivating heroines in recent fiction.
About the Author
Larry Brown was the author of eight previous books. A recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the University of North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe Prize, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, he passed away in 2004.