Visible Spirits - Hardcover

"Independent booksellers are really rooting for this lyrical novel, about a small Mississippi town during Reconstruction. They are hoping to win over the same readers who helped make the small novel Plainsong a big hit a few years ago."
–Editor's Picks, Wall Street Journal

"Absorbing and instructive . . . Visible Spirits brilliantly brings to life the beginnings of the bleak turn in Southern history that C. Vann Woodward once identified as "the strange career of Jim Crow."
–Christopher Tilghman, Washington Post Book World

"A compelling look at moral courage, full of passion . . . The place, people, events and emotions are so authentic in Steve Yarbrough's second novel, it's hard to believe the story is fiction."
–J. Ford Huffman, USA Today

"Invites comparison with Faulkner's greatest novels, Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, Robert Penn Warren's Band of Angels, even To Kill a Mockingbird . . .Yarbrough's novel holds up fine against its elder cousins."
–Diane Roberts, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Visible Spirits is a strong, moving novel that captures the texture of daily life in the Old South, and the virulence and complexity of racial prejudice . . . Yarbrough writes with insight, compassion and humor, so a realistic tale becomes refreshing and vibrant.”
—Ha Jin

“Steve Yarbrough is a confident and elegant prose stylist and a storyteller who knows how empty spaces can resonate with power and meaning. It is the unspoken, the invisible and the unacknowledged that give this novel its dramatic complexity, its profound force and depth of feeling. It is the interstices between the lines that evoke not only historical grief but the grief of our own time.”
—David Guterson

“In clean elastic prose, Steve Yarbrough has fashioned a rich dark fable out of his Mississippi material—a fable whose moral applies as much today as it would have in the yesterday it’s written about.”
—Kent Haruf

“Steve Yarbrough’s Visible Spirits is fiercely remembered in the blood of every Deltacrat. A powerful novel that lays the guilt down freshly in a story that’s irresistible and, finally, howling to be told. True Art.” —Barry Hannah

In 1902, in a small community deep in the Mississippi Delta, nearly a generation after the end of slavery, events obscured by time but impossible to forgive or forget echo in the lives of blacks and whites alike. As bound together by history as they are separated by mutual distrust, the citizens of Loring face present tensions as they look toward an uncertain future.
Into this charged atmosphere rides Tandy Payne-prodigal son of a prominent planter and brother of the current mayor, and a dissolute gambler looking to reclaim the family estate. When he takes advantage of a perceived slight from the town's black postmistress, the ensuing clash with his principled brother results in a harrowing confrontation. Fueled by dark and brutal memories, their familial dispute quickly spreads through the countryside. Steve Yarbrough confronts character with morality, reason with blood, in this moving novel that explores the farthest boundaries of human nature.