Doug Marlette Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Bridge (2001)
  2. Magic Time (2006)

Novels Book Covers

Doug Marlette Books Overview

The Bridge

From the Pulitzer Prize winning Doug Marlette comes a captivating story of family and forgiveness, of indomitable women and their courageous, headstrong men. It is the story of an enduring friendship, and of a bittersweet longing as old as Shakespeare and as contemporary as today’s headlines. Pick Cantrell is a successful newspaper cartoonist whose career has hit the skids. Fired from his job in New York and in the grip of a midlife meltdown, he returns with his wife and son to a small North Carolina town, where he confronts the ghosts of his past in the form of the family matriarch and his boyhood nemesis, Mama Lucy. While attempting to renovate an old house and repair his damaged marriage, Pick discovers his family’s ties to the historic home and his own connection to a place he belonged to long before it ever belonged to him. What follows is an extraordinary story within a story, as Pick uncovers startling truths about himself and about the role his grandmother played in the tragic general textile strike Of 1934, one of the least known major events of American history. Moving from the frontlines of New York City publishing to the storied backroads of the old South, The Bridge is a sweeping and poignant tale of love and betrayal, forbidden passions and longburied secrets, of a man’s struggle with his heritage and with himself. And the ancient bridge where past and present meet.A novel both comic and tragic and written with the same wit, insight, and unflinching honesty Marlette has long brought to his prizewinning cartoons The Bridge explores how much we ever really know about others, and, most important, about ourselves.

Magic Time

A prize winning Southern master storyteller weaves a riveting tale of love, mystery and justice When the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Doug Marlette last turned to fiction, Valerie Sayers rejoiced in The Washington Post Book World: The Bridge is a great story exuberant, proud, myth challenging and Marlette has a great, Dickensian time with the telling. Pat Conroy saluted The Bridge as the finest first novel to come out of North Carolina since Look Homeward, Angel. Studs Turkel called it enthralling. Kaye Gibbons marveled at its extraordinary grace and humor. And the Southeast Booksellers Association gave The Bridge the 2002 Book Award for Fiction. Marlette’s new novel, Magic Time, is a spellbinding stew of history, murder, courtroom drama, humor, love, betrayal, and justice. Moving between New York City and the New South of the early 1990s, with flashbacks to Mississippi s cataclysmic Freedom Summer of 1964, Magic Time tells the story of New York newspaper columnist Carter Ransom, a son of Mississippi, who had the great fortune and terrible luck of falling in love that summer of 64 with a New York born civil rights worker who wound up being killed alongside three coworkers. Carter s father, the local judge, presided over the first trial of the murders. But now there s evidence that the original trial was flawed, even fraudulent. And the question, among many others, is whether the good judge was knowingly involved in a cover up. Magic Time is that rare thing: a page turner whose driving plot line is matched by the depth of its moral vision.

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