A man nearing the end of a murderous quest — to hunt down and kill his wife's lover — pauses on the brink of action. He can carry out the plan he's made, he realizes, but what will he do then? He is "at the point on an ancient map beyond which the old cartographers had drawn dragons."

His seventeen-year-old son, meanwhile, is home alone, both parents gone, and doesn't know what to make of himself. In his solitude he begins to lose his sense of who he is, and the landscape and objects around him seem fraught with meaning: "The house seemed to be listening to him. To be waiting. As if he'd begun to tell some tale and the house was waiting for him to continue, listening patiently to hear the end of the story. But he'd lost the thread of the narrative and he could not go on."

In the ties between these two men, in the world they encounter and the worlds they make for themselves, is situated a powerful, brooding novel. The plot is full of dangerous men and murky goings-on, but Provinces of Night rises above these trappings by means of human warmth, humor, and an aching, unexpected poetry.

Set in Tennessee in 1952, the book focuses on the aptly named Bloodworth clan: three generations of sharecroppers, bootleggers, and mystics. There is E.F., an old bluesman on the run, and his wife, Julia, whom he abandoned decades ago. There are their children: Warren, who is lost to dissipation (and whose son is following his lead); Boyd, dispassionately out to kill; and Brady, at home with his mother, inventing curses for his enemies. And there is Fleming, Boyd's son, smart enough to see his elders for what they are, and young enough to still have hope. While the older Bloodworths pursue their vendettas and chase down their good times, Fleming's hope becomes the crux of the novel as he tries, step by perilous step, to find a way off his family's well-trodden path to despair.