Synopses & Reviews
Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third -- and final -- chance to free himself from spiritual and social enslavement.
Review
"Alice Walker is a lavishly gifted writer." The New York Tiems Book Review
Review
"Alice Walker is one of the best American writers of today." The Washington Post
Review
"Walker dares to reveal truths about men and women, about blacks and whites, about God and love....And we, like Alice Walker's marvelous characters, come away transformed by knowledge and love but most of all by wonder." Essense
Review
"[Alice Walker] shrinks from no moral or emotional complexity....She is a marvelous writer." San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Color Purple: a "moving, tender" novel of a Deep South tenant farmer's quest for a new life (Publishers Weekly).
Grange Copeland, a deeply conflicted and struggling tenant farmer in the Deep South of the 1930s, leaves his family and everything he's ever known to find happiness and respect in the cold cities of the North. This misadventure, his "second life," proves a dismal failure that sends him back where he came from to confront his now grown-up son's disastrous relationships with his own family, including Grange's granddaughter, Ruth Copeland, a child that Grange grows to love. Love becomes the substance of his third and final life. He spends it in devotion to Ruth, teaching and protecting her -- though the cost of doing so is almost more than he can bear.
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, this is an "honest sensitive tale . . . leavened by those moments of humor and warmth that have enabled men and women to endure so much tragedy" (Chicago Daily News).
About the Author
Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple, which was preceded by The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian. Her other bestselling novels include By the Light of My Father's Smile, Possessing the Secret of Joy and The Temple of My Familiar. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, three collections of essays, five volumes of poetry and several children's books. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker now lives in Northern California.