Waiting for AprilWaiting for April
Everything changes the night a man named Sanders Collier - strikingly handsome and elegantly dressed - makes his dramatic entrance into the Florida panhandle town of Citrus. Even after he settles down, marries, and has a child, he sets off a chain of events that culminates with his death in a suspicious "hunting" accident. Sanders's son, Roy, grows up listening to his mother's stories about his aristocratic father. But there's more than one story circulating through town about Sanders Collier. No one, Roy realizes, will tell him the truth. Especially not his mother's younger and more beautiful sister, April.
Roy's Aunt April takes him under her wing and teaches him to live exuberantly and passionately. But when he grows into the mirror image of his father, the secrets of the past begin to reveal themselves.
This is the story of a family plagued by its own history, and of a son looking for the truth about his murdered father. And it's the story of April, who makes every man in Citrus do crazy things. Including her own nephew.
On a stormy night in 1965, a man carrying a suitcase holding army discharge papers and a Bronze Star strode into the little town of Citrus, Florida, and changed everything. He called himself Sanders Collier and said he was the son of a prominent family of South Carolina gentry. He was handsome and cunning, and people believed him.
Within a few years he would be dead, shot in what would always be called a hunting accident. Who was hunting what was never clear to his son, left behind to make sense of a town split apart by the things his father had done. But when Roy grows into the spitting image of his father, the unspoken agreement to keep buried the old resentments about the past comes undone.
What follows for this family is the unraveling of every lie, half-truth, self-delusion, and wishful thought on which they had built their lives since the arrival of Sanders Collier. Only after the selfless sacrifice of one very odd, profane, saintly man does Roy finally understand what happened the night his father died.
Set in the lush, fertile world of the Florida panhandle, WAITING FOR APRIL is a complex, funny, sometimes dark story. When the Oxford American said Scott Morris's first book was a harbinger of even greater things, this is the book they were talking about.
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- Chapel Hill, N.C. : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003.
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